



















* 


















A CRITIQUE OF 
LOGICAL POSITIVISM 






A CRITIQUE OF 
LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 


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My thanks are due to the editors of the 
Hibbert Journal and World Review for permission 
to republish in Chapters IV and IX some 
passages which originally appeared as parts 
of articles in those journals. 


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tftttGB® DSP 031 * 


RECEIVED 
SEP 2 8 1950 
COPYRIGHT OFFICE 


The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 37 
W. J. Gage & Co., Limited, Toronto 2B, Canada 

Copyright in the International Copyright Union. All rights 
reserved. Published 1950. Printed in Great Britain by 
Jarrold and Sons , Limited, Norwich 



CONTENTS 


O 

cr 
c\s 

Introduction page 9 


S'' 

Chapter I. Logical Positivism. Its Methods and 

Purposes 21 

II. Physical Things and Our Knowledge of 

Them 32 

III. The Principle of Verifiability 43 

IV. Logical Positivism and Theory of Knowledge 63 

V. Logical Constructions 79 

VI. General Principles and Theory of Truth 87 

VII. Analysis of the Self 101 

VIII. Theory of Value 108 

IX. The Effects of Logical Positivism 143 


Index 


153 




“Although we must consider how we should express 
ourselves in each particular case, it is still more important 
to consider what the facts are.” 


Aristotle’s Metaphysics. 






INTRODUCTION 


Occasion of Book 

In the summer of 1948 an article appeared in the New States¬ 
man under the signature of Oxonian on the condition of con¬ 
temporary Oxford. Among other matters it drew attention to 
the vogue of Logical Positivism and, in particular, to the 
influence of Professor Ayer’s book, Language , Truth and Logic , 
which, published in 1936, “has in Oxford since the end of the 
war acquired almost the status of a philosophic Bible”. 

The effect of the book is, Oxonian maintained, to discourage 
any probing into “deeper meanings” by its exclusion of value 
judgments and its dismissal of metaphysics as nonsense. It has, 
therefore, he concluded, engendered a negative climate of 
opinion which is favourable to Fascism, “since Fascism steps 
into the vacuum left by an abeyance of concern with funda¬ 
mental human values”. The article attracted a considerable 
amount of attention and evoked a number of letters mainly 
from supporters of Logical Positivism disclaiming any political 
or social influence for logical positivist doctrines and, in par¬ 
ticular, repudiating the suggestion that they give indirect 
encouragement to Fascism by contributing to the formation of a 
climate of opinion favourable to its growth. For my part, I 
ventured to doubt whether these disclaimers were justified. I 
gave expression to this doubt in an article which was published 
in the New Statesman in which, without hazarding any opinion 
as to whether the doctrines of Logical Positivism were true—a 
word, by the way, which in any commonly accepted interpreta¬ 
tion logical positivists would promptly repudiate as meaning¬ 
less —1 p U t the question whether they were calculated to have 
the effect which Oxonian attributed to them, a question which 
I answered in the affirmative. 

The number of letters which the article elicited was a surprise 
to the editor, no less than to the writer. I doubt, indeed, if any 
article on a purely academic topic had for years evoked so 
considerable a response. It was evident that the subject of 
Logical Positivism, though comparatively unknown to the 

9 


10 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

intellectual public which at this time was interesting itself in 
Existentialism, was of immense interest to many professional 
and amateur philosophers, to students of philosophy and to 
those who dwell intellectually on what may be called the 
philosophic fringe. 

Logical Positivism seemed to be at a stage of development 
analogous to that of Materialism in the 6o’s and 70’s of the 
last century and of Marxism in the first two decades of this 
century. It was, that is to say, a body of philosophic doctrine 
which, already fashionable among professional philosophers, 
was only awaiting the appropriate exponent or, it may be, the 
timely occasion to capture the intellectual public at large. 
For there were certain respects in which, it was obvious, the 
doctrine was highly congenial to the climate of the times. 

A University teacher is in a good position to observe that 
climate and to note its changes. Year after year he sees each 
October a fresh relay of young men and women enrolling as 
his students. What, he wonders, will be their intellectual 
orientation; wherein will lie their instinctive sympathies; what 
will be the arguments which will seem to them immediately 
appealing; what the conclusions which they will naturally tend 
to draw; what the positions which they will regard as old- 
fashioned, reactionary or palpably nonsensical? What, in a 
word, will be their preconditioning intellectual framework, a 
framework into which some considerations and conclusions will 
fit ready-made, while others can find no accommodation? For 
that there are these changes and that young men and women 
grow up in an intellectual climate which predisposes their 
sympathies in advance there can, I think, be little doubt. In 
the ’20’s, scepticism and “debunking” were the intellectual 
order of the day; in the 5 30’s, the predominant sympathies were 
Marxist and the arguments of dialectical Materialism see^med to 
spring ready-made to the lips of the class-conscious young; in the 
’40’s the background was, at any rate in England, predomi¬ 
nantly logical positivist. Under its influence young men and 
women confidently affirm that there are no absolutes, that meta¬ 
physics is nonsense, that the scientific is the only method which 
reaches valid results and that the order of reality which science 
studies is the only order that there is. Such time-honoured 
denizens of the philosopher’s world as the Forms of Plato, the 
traditional values, the True, the Beautiful and the Good, the 


INTRODUCTION 


I I 

demonstrated God of Leibnitz and Descartes, the Absolute of 
Hegel and the subsistent objects of the conceptual realists are 
contemptuously dismissed. 

Intolerance and Dogmatism 

The doctrines of Logical Positivism are embraced with some 
of the fervour appropriate to a new religious creed. Two 
characteristics have traditionally been observed in the expo¬ 
nents of new revelations. First, intolerance and secondly, 
dogmatism. Something of both is observable in logical positiv¬ 
ist polemics. 

Intolerance is chiefly shown in a simple refusal to discuss 
metaphysical questions. These are dismissed as not worthy of 
the attention of sensible men. When one remembers that these 
are precisely the questions which have, in fact, engaged the 
attention of philosophers from Plato to Aquinas, from Spinoza 
to Hegel, and from Bradley to Whitehead, it is difficult to 
resist the temptation of asking logical positivists with what 
authority they take it upon themselves so unceremoniously to 
dismiss the preoccupations of these great men. 

As the exponents of the doctrine have grown older, the doc¬ 
trine itself has grown milder and Professor Ayer now tells us 1 
that it is only to one proper sense of the word “meaning” that 
the verification principle applies. There may, it now appears, 
be other senses of the word “meaning”, and he allows the possi¬ 
bility that metaphysical statements may have meaning in one 
of these other senses. Indeed “for the effective elimination of 
metaphysics” the principle “needs”, we are now told, “to be 
supported by detailed analyses of particular metaphysical 
arguments”. (The detailed analysis by the way is far from 
being always forthcoming.) 

But it is not the milder form of the doctrine, which allows 
that metaphysics may not be nonsense that interests students. 
What has struck their imagination is the grandeur of the original 
assertion that metaphysics is nonsense. 

Many contemporary minds seem to have conceived a real 
distaste for metaphysics. Whether this distaste is a reflection of 
the acceptance of logical positivist doctrines, or whether it is 
the expression in philosophy of the spirit of the times and they 
are only the modes of its rationalization, it is difficult to say. 

1 In the Introduction to the Revised (1948) Edition of Language, Truth and Logic. 


12 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

The fact is, however, undeniable, and students of philosophy 
are heard to echo the traditional complaint that traditional 
logic is word-chopping and traditional metaphysics barren and 
empty speculation. Some go further and intimate that the 
classical preoccupations of philosophers are not only time- 
wasting but deliberately obscurantist. Their suggestion is that 
philosophy, as ordinarily conceived, has turned men’s minds 
away from the only reality that matters, the reality of the 
scientist’s world, and entangled them in a web of word-spinning 
about questions that have no meaning. The time-honoured 
discussions of philosophy are, they intimate, eternal, precisely 
because they can never be settled. For the conclusions of the 
discussions are conclusions about nothing or, more precisely, 
they only report to us the ways in which philosophers have 
decided to use words. In dismissing these discussions and their 
conclusions, logical positivists speak of them with a real repug¬ 
nance. Traditional metaphysics is, for them, an incubus which 
philosophy has carried for too long and they see themselves in 
the light of liberators who have come to release philosophers 
from their burden. Or they speak of traditional philosophy as 
if it were no more than a mass of superstition, which it was their 
mission to dispel. . . . 

Their general attitude is, then, that of philosophic radicals 
who, conscious of a mission, share to the full the confident 
aggressiveness of their political prototypes. 

The second characteristic which logical positivists share with 
the exponents of religious revelation is dogmatism. It is 
impossible to read logical positivist literature without being 
struck by the recurrence of dogmatic statements. Doctrines 
such as the verification principle, the “emotive theory” of 
ethics, or the theory of logical constructions are simply an¬ 
nounced, as if they formed part of a revelation which, denied 
to all previous philosophers with the exception of Hume, in 
whom glimmerings of the light first appeared, has been suddenly 
vouchsafed to the third, fourth and fifth decades of the twentieth 
century. The Viennese circle were particularly given to the 
making of such announcements. . . . 

Or there are the frequent assertions that some philosophical 
problem has been definitely settled. “We shall see”, writes 
Ayer, “when we come finally to settle the conflict between 
Idealism and Realism”, or, he speaks of, “the dispute between 


INTRODUCTION 1 3 

rationalists and empiricists of which we have now finally 
disposed”. 

The claim to have settled once and for all a number of the 
disputes which for centuries have so bootlessly agitated the 
misguided intellects of mankind Logical Positivism shares with 
Marxism, as it shares its intolerance. 

Heat. Intolerance and dogmatism combine to engender 
heat. A discussion with logical positivists offers a curious con¬ 
trast between the matter and the manner—the matter so 
abstract and mild, the manner so eager and hot. Logical 
Positivism holds that most ethical judgments are “emotive”; 
they are not judgments to the effect that so and so is right or 
wrong, good or bad, they are ejaculations of the emotions of 
approval and disapproval. The attitude adopted in discussion to 
dissenters would seem to bear out at any rate the emotional 
part of this doctrine. Disagreement is equated with sin and is 
heatedly brushed aside, while failure to understand some ab¬ 
struse trend of reasoning is ascribed less to the thickheadedness 
that cannot, than to the wilful prejudice that will not see. To 
venture a doubt in regard to conclusions, to point out incon¬ 
sistencies in the methods of reaching them, is to assist the 
forces of obscurantism and to do a disservice to the cause of 
enlightenment. 

The bewildered participant finds himself reminded of the 
atmosphere which pervaded the discussion of the early Christian 
heresies. Looking back after 1500 years, we marvel that Arian 
should have controverted so fiercely with Athanasian and 
Nestorian should have waxed so hot with Monophysite about 
points of doctrine whose moment is to us so small, whose 
content is so obscure and in regard to which the truth is, one 
would have thought, incapable of determination. 

So, I think, in some future time philosophers may look back 
on our contemporary discussions of the correct analysis of 
sentences and the various meanings of meaning and wonder 
that men should have contrived to feel so strongly about matters 
whose theoretical import is obscure and whose practical 
relevance is non-existent. And then he may find significance 
in the resemblance of circumstances. The civilization of St. 
Augustine and St. Athanasius, which had continued compara¬ 
tively unchanged for the best part of a thousand years, was 
about to collapse. In this prospect St. Augustine and those 


14 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

who controverted with him betrayed in their discussions no 
interest whatever, nor did the matters which concerned them 
have any relevance to the forces of change which were about 
to engulf the ancient world. A similar indifference, a similar 
remoteness characterizes the discussions of contemporary 
Logical Positivism. 

New Revelations 

Nor is this the only point of similarity. In the early develop¬ 
ment of religious movements, history attests the frequent 
appearance of new revelations. Each fresh revelation claims, as it 
appears, to supersede its predecessors. Their inspiration is imper¬ 
fect, suspect or out of date; their interpretation is mistaken; it 
and it alone conveys the pure milk of the true doctrine. When 
such claims are made, we are, it is obvious, witnessing the birth 
of a heresy, for, whichever of the competing claimants to be the 
repository of the true doctrine ultimately establishes itself as the 
current orthodoxy, by the very fact of its success it convicts its 
rivals of being heresies. It was so with the heresy of Arianism 
which was made heretical by reason of the victory of Trinitar- 
ianism as expounded in the Athanasian creed. It is so in con¬ 
temporary Russia where interpretations of Marxist doctrine 
such as those of Trotsky or Bukharin were convicted of deviation- 
ism by the establishment of Leninism, subsequently transformed 
into Stalinism, as the correct interpretation of the Marxist Bible. 

The condition of Christianity presents an analogous pheno¬ 
menon. A number of different sects put forward competing 
claims to embody the true doctrine of Jesus Christ. All alike are 
denounced as heretical with comprehensive impartiality by the 
Catholic Church. This is extremely embarrassing for the critic 
of Christianity, since, whatever doctrine he selects for examina¬ 
tion and criticism, a host of demurrers will always be found to 
insist that this is not the true Christian doctrine, that no respon¬ 
sible or authoritative body of Christians has ever held it—or has 
held it for at least a hundred years—and that he would be well 
advised to get up his subject to the extent of finding out what 
Christians do, in fact, believe before he ventures to criticize 
their beliefs. A reaction on these lines may be expected, whatever 
version of Christianity is selected for examination. 

Allowing for the reduction in scale the situation which con¬ 
fronts the critic of Logical Positivism is not dissimilar. Having 


INTRODUCTION 


15 

regard to the widespread and growing influence of Logical 
Positivism, a critical examination of its main doctrines would, I 
thought, be not untimely. I wanted to find out on what precisely 
this widespread influence was based and to form a judgment as to 
whether it was merited, hoping that, if my examination showed 
that the influence was excessive, something might perhaps be 
effected in the way of diminishing it. 

Where, then, was I to look for an authoritative exposition of 
logical positivist doctrine? The answer that immediately sug¬ 
gested itself was that such an exposition was to be found in 
Professor Ayer’s book Language , Truth and Logic. This book had 
been described in the article in the New Statesman to which I 
have already referred as possessing “almost the status of a 
philosophic Bible” and I could myself testify to the considerable 
influence which it had exerted on the minds of students with 
whom, in the last few years, I had been in contact. I accord¬ 
ingly decided to take this book as my text. When, however, I 
came to act .upon this decision, I found myself faced with a 
number of difficulties. 

To the first of these I have already alluded. It is the difficulty 
which the critics of Logical Positivism share with the critics of 
contemporary Christianity. So soon as I mentioned a particular 
doctrine of Ayer’s and indicated objections to which, as it 
seemed to me, it was exposed, voices were raised to assure me 
that I was wasting my powder and shot since, either the doc¬ 
trine in question was not a part of Logical Positivism proper or, 
though it had once been held by logical positivists, it was now 
generally abandoned. The name of some other exponent of 
Logical Positivism would then be mentioned as more authorita¬ 
tive or more up to date. No longer Ayer’s but-’s work was, 

it would be intimated, now the repository of the true doctrine. 
In this connexion the names of Professors Ryle or Wisdom 
would frequently be mentioned, or philosophers in America 
would be invoked, or the remnant of the Viennese circle. . . . 
More recently my attention has been drawn to the doctrines of 
an Oxford teacher, whose contribution to a certain Symposium 
embodied a variation of logical positivist doctrine which put all 
the others out of court. This, I was assured, was the very latest 
thing. The only drawback to taking this latest version as my 
text, was that apart from the contribution in question, this par¬ 
ticular teacher did not appear to have committed his views to 



1 6 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

paper. The truth is that whatever statement of Logical Positiv¬ 
ism one takes, one runs the risk of being told that it is out of date, 
or that it represents a deviationist view. Other critics have, I 
know, found themselves equally at a loss to discover what the 
doctrine is with which at any given moment what may be called 
the authoritative and orthodox version of Logical Positivism is 
to be identified. 

A not dissimilar difficulty arises in regard to name. A number 
of allied doctrines which during the last twenty years have been 
fashionable in philosophy have been referred to under titles of 
which Logical Positivism, Logical Analysis, Metaphysical 
Analysis and Philosophical Analysis are the best known. What¬ 
ever doctrine a critic may single out for treatment as forming an 
integral part of logical positivist theory, he runs the risk of being 
told that whatever else Logical Positivism may maintain, this 
particular doctrine is not part of Logical Positivism, though it 
may, of course, be maintained by some other school as, for 
example, that of Philosophical Analysis. 

Many of its adherents have always shown a certain dissatis¬ 
faction with the denomination of their school of thought as 
Logical Positivism and displayed such impatience and, as the 
years have passed, such increasing impatience, when the title of 
“logical positivist” has been applied to their doctrines as to 
justify the allusion of a well-known Oxford historian to “the 
subject. . . which now spends its time debating whether it was 
once correct to describe it as Logical Positivism”. 

Yet a further difficulty was constituted by the fact that Ayer 
himself had recently brought out a revised edition of his book 
in the Introduction to which some of the most characteristic 
doctrines enunciated in the first edition had been so modified 
that they had, as it seemed to me, lost most of what might be 
called their striking force. Some had even been retracted. 

Finally, many of the doctrines of Logical Positivism cut at the 
root of traditional philosophical procedures and have therefore 
been subjected to extensive criticism. Hence, whatever criti¬ 
cisms I might myself suggest would be to a certain extent a 
re-statement of objections that had already been ventilated. 

In spite of these disabilities I decided to go on with my 
original plan of subjecting to a fairly detailed examination 
the doctrines contained in the first edition of Language , Truth and 
Logic. My reasons were two. First, I was chiefly interested in the 


INTRODUCTION 


17 

effects of Logical Positivism upon contemporary thought. In 
particular, I wanted to satisfy myself as to whether it was, indeed, 
calculated to produce the effects which Oxonian had attributed 
to it. Now, it was Ayer’s statement of Logical Positivism which, 
it was generally agreed, had been influential and it was the 
original statement contained in the first edition, not the modi¬ 
fications and retractions of the Introduction to the second that 
had attracted the attention of young philosophers or of non¬ 
philosophers. The doctrine as modified was not calculated to 
have the striking impact of the original statement, apart from 
the fact that there had not been time for the revised version 
to influence the thinking of non-specialists. 

Secondly, although the criticisms of Logical Positivism had 
been numerous they had been scattered over a wide field, 
appearing in a number of periodicals, papers read to Societies 
and contributions to symposia. Most of them were, moreover, 
directed against some particular point of logical positivist 
theory. It would, I thought, be valuable to gather these various 
criticisms together and to present them within the confines of 
a single volume, so that they constituted what might fairly be 
called a critical examination of the doctrine as a whole. Only 
in this way, I thought, would it be possible to obtain a general 
view of Logical Positivism, of its claims and of their validity, 
and so to form a judgment as to whether the important 
influence it had undoubtedly exerted were such as it was justly 
entitled to exert. 

That it Makes No Difference 

As I indicated at the beginning, the immediate intention of 
this book is practical. I am concerned to enquire what effects 
are liable to be produced by Logical Positivism upon the minds 
of those who are brought into contact with it and to consider 
whether these are such as are desirable. The answer to these 
questions may most appropriately be given after I have reviewed 
the main doctrines of Logical Positivism more particularly as 
they touch upon ethics and aesthetics, and have discussed the 
emotive theory of value. I shall, therefore, return to the question 
in the final chapter of this book. Here I confine myself to one 
specific point. Prima facie, the practical effects of the wholesale 
repudiation of the traditional claims of philosophy might, if it 
could be sustained, be expected to be considerable. The dismissal 


1 8 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

of God, freedom and immortality as the appropriate subjects 
of mature consideration and discussion, the abandonment of 
metaphysics in favour of the analysis of the meaning of words 
are no small matters; the change involved in substituting for 
the understanding of the universe the better understanding of 
certain sentences is no minor change. Hence, one might expect 
those who at an early stage of their philosophical thinking have 
been exposed to the impact of these modes of thought to exhibit 
a noticeably different cast of mind from that of most of their 
predecessors. I believe the expectation to be justified. 

Logical positivists, however, repudiate the suggestion that 
their doctrines have any extra philosophical effect. How, they 
ask, can the adoption of logical positivist methods affect a man’s 
attitude to ethics, aesthetics, politics or theology, seeing that 
these are expressly excluded from the scope of logical positivist 
discussion on the ground that no fruitful philosophical state¬ 
ments can be made about them? In this connexion the Berke- 
leyan analysis of the physical world in terms of ideas and sensa¬ 
tions is sometimes cited as an analogy. Philosophers are agreed 
that Dr. Johnson’s alleged refutation of Berkeley by kicking a 
stone is no refutation at all, because the analysis of a physical 
thing as a congeries of ideas does not imply that we do not 
experience the qualities that we believe ourselves to experience, 
or enjoy and suffer the sensations which we believe ourselves to 
enjoy and suffer. To analyse a table as a collection of ideas 
instead of as a collection of molecules and atoms makes no 
difference to our view of the table as the object at which we dine, 
or to our confidence in its trustworthiness as a foundation for 
plates, knives and forks. All that Berkeley has done is, it is said, 
to give to the table an analysis other than that which common 
sense unreflectingly accepts. This, I think, is true. But the postu¬ 
lated analogy between the logical positivist and the Berkeleyan 
analysis is misleading for two reasons. 

First, as regards metaphysics, Berkeley’s ideas continue to 
exist when the mind of the perceiver ceases to experience them; 
they exist in the mind of God. Now, Berkeley’s God is a meta¬ 
physical entity according to the usage of the word, “meta¬ 
physical”, adopted by logical positivists, that is to say, his exis¬ 
tence is not verifiable by sense-experience; therefore, the ideas as 
they exist in God’s mind are also metaphysical entities. Berkeley, 
then, did not deny metaphysics; on the contrary, a metaphysical 


INTRODUCTION 


19 

system formed the basis—as he believed, the necessary basis—of 
the empirical world. Berkeley was, then, I think, justified in 
claiming that the analysis of the familiar world in terms of 
mental ideas makes no difference to a man’s practice and no 
relevant difference to his theological and philosophical beliefs. 
By “no relevant difference” I mean that men’s beliefs (i) in an 
objective world existing independently of the perceiver’s experi¬ 
ence; and (ii) in an order of reality which exists independently 
of, is not verifiable by and is not, therefore, capable of being an 
object of any sense-experience remains unaffected. 

Neither of these beliefs can, I submit, be validly entertained 
by those who take the logical positivist view. Nor is it the case 
that the abandonment of either of them does not, or at least 
ought not to make any difference to a man’s outlook. On the 
important issue as to whether there is an order of reality other 
than the natural order which gives meaning to and supplies 
a purpose for the life of man as a member of the natural 
order, the difference must, I submit, if these beliefs really are 
abandoned, be crucial. 

In support of this contention I call in witness the case of 
Hume. Pushing Berkeley’s empiricist premises to their logical 
conclusion, he left no rational ground for believing either in an 
objective world existing independently of the perceiver, or in 
an order of reality inaccessible to sense-experience. His position 
is, in fact, reducible to Solipsism. Now, if one really believed 
that Solipsism was true, the fact would, I think, make a con¬ 
siderable difference to one’s outlook. Hume did not believe this 
and was careful to guard himself against any such suggestion 
by affirming not that there was no independent world and no 
objective order of reality, but that he could find no rational 
grounds for believing in them. His conclusion was, in effect, 
“so much the worse for reason”. The effect of his philosophy is, 
then, to belittle reason in order to exalt feeling, his contention 
being that our fundamental philosophical beliefs are the pro¬ 
ducts of our passional rather than of our intellectual natures. 
This is an arguable position, but it is not the position of Logical 
Positivism. 

The bearing of the implications of the logical positivist posi¬ 
tion upon the traditional beliefs of mankind are, therefore, more 
radical than the implications of Hume’s. Logical positivist con¬ 
clusions really do eviscerate the universe. 


20 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

Secondly, as regards ethics, theology and aesthetics, Berke¬ 
ley’s analysis leaves traditional philosophy untouched. He does 
not believe and nowhere suggests that “right”, “good” and 
“God” are meaningless terms, or that ethical judgments and 
theological statements are only emotive. Hence, so far as 
axiology is concerned, Berkeley’s empiricism is compatible with 
a straightforward objectivism which accepts the presence in the 
universe both of ethical and of aesthetic values. 

Berkeley also, especially in his later writings, postulated the 
existence of a priori knowledge and conceded most of what the 
rationalists had claimed. God, the self and ethical values were 
all, for him, included in that “knowledge of spirits” which he 
called “notional”. For these reasons, I think that the analogy 
referred to above is misleading. 

The effects of Logical Positivism will be considered in more 
detail in Chapter IX. 


CHAPTER I 


LOGICAL POSITIVISM. ITS METHODS 
AND PURPOSES 

The Method of Analysis 

What is the aim of the body of doctrine known as Logical 
Positivism? 

The aim is analytic; it is so to analyse sentences and to 
examine the usage of words that thought is clarified and a new 
approach is rendered possible to the traditional problems of 
philosophical discussion. As a result of this approach many are 
found to disappear, not so much because they have been solved 
as because they are seen to be false problems which should never 
have been raised. That they have in fact arisen is due to muddled 
thinking, but the muddled thinking is itself largely the product 
of the inaccurate use of language. 

More explicitly, it is the purpose of philosophy to provide 
definitions: “It is the purpose of a philosophical definition”, 
Ayer writes, “to dispel those confusions which arise from our 
imperfect understanding of certain types of sentence in our 
language.” It is pointed out that while words are symbols, many 
of the words used in the English language are ambiguous 
symbols. Take the word “is”, for example. “If”, says Ayer, “we 
were guided merely by the form of the sign, we should assume 
that the word ‘is’, which occurs in the sentence ‘He is the 
author of that book 5 was the same symbol as the ‘is 5 which 
occurs in the sentence ‘A cat is a mammal 5 .” But when we 
have analysed the two sentences in such a way as to reveal their 
logical structure, we find that “is” means something different 
in each case. Thus, the first sentence “is equivalent to ‘He and 
no one else wrote that book 5 , and the second to ‘The class of 
mammals contains the class of cats 5 ”. 

Again, we normally suppose that the word “exists 55 is a 
symbol which has a distinctive meaning. But logical positivists 
claim to be able to show that existence is not an attribute, that 
its presence in a sentence adds nothing to the meaning of the 


22 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

sentence, and that we have only been led into thinking that it 
does so by reason of the fact that “sentences which express 
existential propositions and sentences which express attributive 
propositions may be of the same grammatical form”. To point 
out the various meanings of the word “is” is to throw an im¬ 
portant light on the problem of universal, which the abandon¬ 
ment of the notion that existence is an attribute enables logical 
positivists to eliminate such concepts as those of Being and 
Reality and contributes therefore to their repudiation of meta¬ 
physics. 

Similarly with regard to things: material things are repre¬ 
sented as logical constructions out of sense-contents, in the sense 
that sentences which contain words which stand for material 
things can (and apparently should) be translated into sentences 
which contain words which are symbols for sense-contents. 

These are examples of the way in which the doctrine that 
philosophy is concerned with verbal definitions and the analysis 
of sentences is applied and developed in practice. 

Its Purpose and Intention 

But to what end is it applied? This question of the end or 
purpose of the analysis of sentences is one to which, as it seems 
to me, insufficient attention has been given. Why, for example, 
to take the last illustrative instance, should sentences about 
material things be translated into sentences about sense- 
contents? What is gained by the translation? Or what is the 
purpose of translating “the author of Waverley was Scotch” into 
“one person and one person only wrote Waverley , and that person 
was Scotch”? The answer, presumably, is that as a result of the 
translation some light is thrown upon the traditional problems 
of philosophy. More precisely, the claim is that clarity of 
thought is so effectively promoted that when exhibited in the 
light of the logical positivist method of analysis and translation 
many, perhaps most, of the problems of philosophy disappear. 

And so, no doubt, they do. But they disappear not because 
they have been solved but because they are dismissed. 

A Demand for Results 

Logical Positivism, as we have seen, makes extravagant 
claims. This time-honoured problem, we are told, is settled, 
that disposed of. 


ITS METHODS AND PURPOSES 


23 

Let us, then, put the questions, what single problem of the 
kind which has traditionally concerned philosophers has been 
solved by the method of analysis, and what is the solution? 
What philosophical questions has the application of logical 
positivist methods finally answered; what agreed conclusions 
have philosophers who have followed the precepts of Logical 
Positivism to show? If by “settled”, “answered” and “agreed” 
we mean settled and answered to the satisfaction of, and agreed 
by most other philosophers, we must, I think, reply “none”. 

Hence, when we are asked to consider and assess the claims 
made on behalf of Logical Positivism, it is, I suggest, not 
unreasonable of us to make some such request as the following: 
“Please be so good as to show us a list of the results, of the 
agreed results, that your method has achieved and of the 
answers, the agreed answers, that it has supplied.” No such 
list is, I submit, forthcoming. If one considers the actual speci¬ 
mens of analysis advanced by logical positivists, it is hard to 
avoid the conclusion that the sentences in which they issue are 
very different from what the ordinary man means by the 
common-sense statements of which the logical positivist claims 
that the sentences are an analysis. Thus, let us suppose that a 
man asserts the common-sense proposition X which, logical posi¬ 
tivists tell him as the result of analysis, is equivalent to T- f£. 
While believing X to be true, the common-sense man is neverthe¬ 
less apt vigorously to deny that X is, in fact, equivalent to T +£ 
and proceeds therefore, vigorously to deny that T +£ is true. 

Consider by way of illustration such a proposition as, “this 
is good”. Now there cannot, I submit, be any doubt that when 
he asserts this proposition, the common-sense man means that 
“this” is good, whatever anybody may happen to think or feel 
about it. In other words, he believes that there are ethical 
qualities which really belong to “objects” such as people, their 
characters, situations and lines of conduct, and that there are 
independent ethical principles by which these qualities can be 
judged and assessed. The ordinary man in other words is an 
unreflecting ethical objectivist. 

Now, according to the logical positivist analysis, these beliefs 
which the ordinary man unreflectingly entertains are wholly 
mistaken. If Logical Positivism is right, when the ordinary man 
says, “this is good”, he is not asserting anything about “this”; 
indeed, he is not asserting a proposition at all. All that he is 


24 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

doing is to express an emotion by making sounds in his larynx 
and ejaculating his breath. Hence, if Logical Positivism is 
right in the analysis which it offers of the proposition “this is 
good”, ordinary language is grossly misleading. “There is”, 
says a logical positivist writer in a recent symposium on The 
Emotive Theory of Ethics , “a pervasive tendency to error in our 
ordinary ethical language .” 1 He illustrates this tendency by the 
common use of the word “good”. 

“We are”, he writes, “equally deceived in our use of the word 
‘good’; we use it to mean an attribute entirely independent of 
minds, but there is no such attribute.” It is hard to resist the 
conclusions: 

(a) That it is not the meaning of language, as it is actually 
used , that is being analysed but the meaning of language as it 
would be used if (i) the logical positivist theory of ethics were 
correct, and (ii) people expressed themselves accurately in 
conformity with the results of the logical positivist analysis of 
what appear prima facie to be ethical situations. 

( b ) That the analysis of the meaning of ethical propositions 
which is offered to us differs from what the ordinary man 
would agree to be their true meaning and from the meaning 
which he intends ethical terms to bear when he uses them. 

Nor is the case of ethics in this respect peculiar. I know of no 
instance in which the philosophical analysis of a common-sense 
proposition proposed by a logical positivist philosopher has been 
generally accepted as being what the proposition does, in fact, 
mean. 

With a view to substantiating this generalization I propose to 
consider in a little more detail what is the logical positivist 
doctrine in regard to philosophical method and what are the 
results that are claimed for the application of the methods which 
logical positivists approve. I shall include in my consideration 
of method what Logical Positivism has to say about the aims 
and scope of philosophy. 

The logical positivist doctrine in regard to the method, aims 
and scope of philosophy may be divided into two parts. There 
is the positive doctrine as to the method which philosophy 
should follow and as to the kind of result it is capable of 
achieving, and there is the negative doctrine as to the methods 

1 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , Supp. Vol. xxn. Contribution by Richard 
Robinson to a symposium on The Emotive Theory of Ethics . 


ITS METHODS AND PURPOSES 


25 

which philosophers have, in fact, followed, but should not have 
followed in the past, and the kind of conclusions which their 
mistaken methods have been mistakenly supposed to reach. 

Positive Doctrine as to the Methods , Scope and Aims of Philosophy 

Putting together a number of different statements from 
Ayer’s book we may summarize the positive doctrine of Logical 
Positivism in regard to the method of philosophy as follows. 

The philosopher does not, or should not, as he has been 
commonly thought to do, “analyse facts or notions or even 
things”. Indeed, it is only in a Pickwickian sense that “facts”, 
“notions” and “things” can be said to exist to be analysed. 
The philosopher’s proper concern is with definitions, to be 
precise, with the “definitions of the corresponding words”. But 
the definitions in which the philosopher is interested are not 
the “explicit” definitions one finds in a dictionary; they are 
“definitions in use”. A symbol, that is, a word in use is defined 
“by showing how the sentences in which it significantly occurs 
can be translated into equivalent sentences, which contain 
neither the definiendum itself, nor any of its synonyms”. Now, this 
process of translation into equivalent sentences is far from being 
the straightforward kind of activity which might have been 
supposed. The relation of equivalence—the kind of equivalence, 
for example, illustrated by the translation of “the author of 
Waverley was Scotch” into “one person and one person only 
wrote Waverley , and that person was Scotch” has to be deduced 
from, “the rules of entailment which characterize the English, 
or any other, language”. Such deduction is a purely logical 
activity “and it is in this logical activity . . . that philosophical 
analysis consists”. Now philosophical analysis is declared to be 
the main part of philosophy. The main function of philosophy 
is, then, to discover those relations of equivalence whereby 
sentences which are descriptive phrases containing symbols in 
use can be translated into equivalent sentences which do not 
contain the symbols or their synonyms. The effect of such trans¬ 
lation is “to increase our understanding of certain sentences”, 
and, as we have seen, the hope is expressed that in consequence 
we shall be able “to dispel those confusions which arise from 
our imperfect understanding of certain types of sentences in our 
language”. To reveal the logical structure of language is to 
clarify thought and dispel confusion. It is because thought has 


26 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

been clarified and confusion dispelled that we get the confident 
claims to have solved problems and settled disputes to which 
reference has already been made. 

The method must, it is obvious, be judged by its results and 
to an examination of these much of the ensuing book is devoted. 
It is because the results are, after all, what matter that I asked 
above whether there is a single instance of an analysis effected 
by logical positivist methods which has resulted in the solution 
of a philosophical problem which is an agreed solution, or in the 
clearing up of a philosophical confusion which most philoso¬ 
phers would agree to have disappeared. It is because the results 
are, after all, what matters that I have ventured the opinion 
that instead of agreed statements and solved problems, we are 
presented only with theories whose status is no higher than that 
of other philosophical theories and with conclusions to which 
only some philosophers subscribe. This opinion the detailed 
account contained in the following chapters of the treatment 
by logical positivists of familiar philosophical problems seeks 
to substantiate. 

Meanwhile, to illustrate the opinion, I cite Ayer’s treatment 
of the problem of the so-called “real” qualities of physical 
things, some account of which is given at the end of Chapter 
II . 1 Now can it, I venture to ask, be seriously maintained that 
Ayer’s “solution” of the problem how, if things are resolvable 
into sense-contents, do we distinguish their so-called “real” 
from their so-called “subjective” or illusory qualities, is so 
immediately convincing that there can no longer be room for 
diversity of opinion on this issue? Or is the “emotive theory” 
of ethics so self-evident that objectivist and utilitarian theories 
of ethics can henceforward be dismissed as no longer deserving 
the attention of sensible men. Unless all or most philosophers 
agree that it is self-evident, the status of the “emotive theory” 
must remain that of a theory, one among many, which there 
is no reason to think that other philosophers will accept as final. 
Yet Ayer certainly writes as if the method of analysis which 
entails the reduction of a physical thing to sense-contents has 
produced a final solution of the problem of “real” qualities, and 
as if utilitarianism and objectivism in ethics were finally dis¬ 
posed of. 

A similar verdict must be passed upon logical positivist 
1 See ch. II, pp. 41, 42. 


ITS METHODS AND PURPOSES 27 

findings in regard to other time-honoured problems of philo¬ 
sophy. The theory of logical constructions, the theory of truth, 
the theory of the self, the theory of the nature of physical things, 
the verification principle itself are all put forward as if they 
constituted final solutions of the problems with which they are 
concerned. The fact that philosophers continue to discuss 
these problems treating them as if they were still open ques¬ 
tions and subjects of controversy, is, it is intimated, due either 
to a stupidity that does not, or to a wilfulness that will not 
understand. Nevertheless, if there is any substance in the 
arguments urged in the following pages, what Logical Positiv¬ 
ism has to say on all these topics belongs not to the category of 
conclusive utterances on issues which they settle, but to that of 
controversial contributions on issues which are still unsettled. 

Negative Doctrine as to the Methods , Scope and Aims of Philosophy 
But it is the critical or negative doctrines of Logical Positiv¬ 
ism as to the methods, scope and aims of philosophy that have 
attracted most attention and it is to them that it owes the major 
part of its influence. They consist, in effect, of a series of repudia¬ 
tions. I will endeavour to throw these into relief by contrasting 
them with what may be called the traditional view of the 
methods and aims of philosophy. 

The Traditional Philosophy of the West 
The traditional philosophy of Western Europe holds that, 
transcending the familiar world of things known to us by our 
senses and explored by science, there is another order of reality 
which contains values. Of these, Goodness, Beauty and Truth 
are pre-eminent, and constitute the grounds of ethics, aesthetics 
and logic respectively. In other words, it is because the universe 
is—or contains—a moral order that some things are right and 
some wrong; because it contains an aesthetic order that some 
things are beautiful and some ugly, and because there is such 
a thing as truth that some judgments are true and some false. 
Many philosophers would add that the universe also includes 
deity and that deity is the source of the values, Goodness, 
Truth and Beauty, being, as religion puts it, the modes of 
God’s revelation of Himself to man. Metaphysics—the study of 
the reality which transcends and underlies the familiar world 
—is, therefore, in part, the study of the values and of God. 


28 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

Such, I think, is the general deposit laid down by the 
philosophical thinking of Western Europe, reinforced by 
Christianity, over the last two thousand years. Upon those who 
believe in it it has a practical effect, providing them, as it 
does, with principles to live by and purposes to live for. The 
principles are those of morality; the purpose is to work for the 
increase of what is good, beautiful and true, both in one’s life 
and in the world. 

There is, of course, another, the empirical tradition. The 
empirical tradition is particularly strong in English philosophy. 
Starting with Locke and running through Berkeley and Hume 
to Mill, it denies, in so far as it is consistent, the existence of 
first principles revealed to the eye of reason, repudiates meta¬ 
physics and holds that all our knowledge comes to us through 
experience, by which it means sense-experience. There is, 
therefore, no order of reality other than the familiar order 
which our senses reveal and science explores—at least, if there 
is, we can have no knowledge of it. Such, with reservations, 
was the contention of Locke, and such, maintained with 
infinitely greater vigour and consistency, was the conclusion of 
Hume to whom logical positivists look with respect as the 
founder of their school. In saying that the traditional philosophy 
of Western Europe maintains the validity of metaphysics and 
the existence of objective values, I am not, of course, denying 
the existence of this empiricist tradition. I would merely assert 
that it does not and never has been, even in England where its 
chief strength has lain, the dominant tradition. 

The Impact of Logical Positivism 

What is the impact of logical positivist thought upon what 
I have called the dominant tradition? Ayer tells us that all 
propositions that have meaning may be divided into two 
classes, those which concern empirical matters of fact and those 
which philosophers have called a priori , which concern the 
“relations of ideas”. The former have meaning only if they are 
verifiable, by which he means that “some possible sense- 
experience should be relevant to the determination of their 
truth or falsehood”. Thus, it is meaningful to say that the 
battle of Waterloo was fought in 1815 because we can conceive 
the kind of sense-experience which would verify the statement. 
The latter are the propositions of logic and mathematics; they 


ITS METHODS AND PURPOSES 


29 

are certain only because they are purely analytic; analytic 
propositions are tautologies. Thus the proposition 2x5 = 10 is 
certain only because it says the same thing in two different 
ways. 

All metaphysical assertions, that is to say, all assertions 
about the nature of reality or about a realm of values trans¬ 
cending the familiar world are, therefore, meaningless, since 
only those empirical propositions have meaning which are 
theoretically verifiable. And, since any sense-experience must, 
inevitably, be an experience of the familiar world, and not, 
therefore, of an order of reality transcending the familiar world, 
no metaphysical proposition can be verified. Ayer is quite 
explicit on this point, telling us “that it cannot be significantly 
asserted that there is a non-empirical world of values”. 

In all these respects it is, I think, clear that the main tradi¬ 
tion of philosophy is repudiated and the historic claims of 
philosophy denied. Philosophy, as traditionally conceived, may 
be described as a sustained endeavour to understand the 
universe as a whole, not, that is to say, like physics or biology or 
religion, some particular department of it, but the whole mass 
of data to which the reports of the scientist, the intuitions of 
the artist and the religious insight of the saint contribute no less 
than the day-to-day experience of the ordinary man. Men have 
sought to achieve this understanding not only for its own sake, 
because man is impelled to try to find out the nature of this 
puzzling universe in which his life is set, but also for practical 
reasons, in order that light may be thrown upon the nature and 
purpose of human life and deductions drawn as to the best way 
of living it. 

Philosophy has, therefore, had the dual purpose of revealing 
truth and increasing virtue. In this second connexion, philoso¬ 
phers, as I have pointed out, have sought to provide principles 
to live by and purposes to live for; principles and purposes 
which they have endeavoured to derive from an examination 
of the nature of value. It is partly in order that they might 
perform this practical office of assisting men to lead good lives, 
that philosophers have striven to achieve a synoptic view of the 
universe as a whole. 

But if Logical Positivism is right, philosophy cannot perform 
this function. It cannot help us to understand the universe, it 
cannot provide us with a synoptic view of the whole whose 


30 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

different departments are explored by the sciences and it 
cannot light up the dark places of the world. For there is no 
universe other than the different departments of natural fact 
explored by the sciences and the world contains no dark places 
—at least, if certain matters are still obscure, that is only 
because science has not yet pushed its researches far enough. 

Impotent to assist us to comprehend the universe as a whole, 
philosophy is no better equipped to assess the status and to 
define the purposes of human life. It cannot, then, provide men 
with purposes to live for or principles to live by. Thus, ethics 
goes the way of metaphysics. Indeed, the two repudiations are 
connected. It is because there is no meaning in things, or, at 
least, no meaning that philosophy can discern, that we cannot 
ascribe a purpose to human existence; it is because the world 
which we know by means of our senses and explore by the 
instruments of science is the only world that questions relating 
to the nature and destiny of man go by default. God, freedom 
and immortality are subjects which it is fruitless to discuss 
because the terms of the discussion are meaningless. 

Effect upon Ethics , Aesthetics and Religion 

The charge of meaninglessness is applied in detail to ethics, 
aesthetics and religion. In ethics, having rejected both Utili¬ 
tarianism and Subjectivism, Ayer proceeds to a statement of 
his own ethical views. Let us, first, suppose that ethical proposi¬ 
tions are empirical. Now, the statement, “this is wrong”, 
cannot, Professor Ayer points out, be wholly reduced to em¬ 
pirical concepts, since there is no ^/we-experience of the 
quality of wrongness. Since empirical propositions have mean¬ 
ing only if they are empirically verifiable, it follows that the 
statement, “this is wrong”, is meaningless. Nor are ethical con¬ 
cepts analytic, for, Professor Ayer maintains, they are not 
analysable being, in fact, pseudo-concepts. (A “pseudo-con¬ 
cept” is only a polite name for a fiction.) What, then, is the 
significance of saying that such and such an action is wrong? 
Its significance is limited to evincing moral disapproval, the 
word “wrong” indicating that the statement is “attended by 
certain feelings in the speaker”. Professor Ayer goes on, “if now 
I generalize . . . and say, ‘Stealing money is wrong’, I produce 
a sentence which has no factual meaning—that is, expresses no 
proposition which can be either true or false. It is as if I had 


ITS METHODS AND PURPOSES 


31 

written, ‘Stealing money! ! 5 ” To make a judgment of ethical 
value is, in short, merely to make an approving or a shocked 
noise; it is to ejaculate emotive sounds. 1 

Similarly, with aesthetic judgments. “Aesthetic words as 
‘beautiful’ and ‘hideous’ are employed . . . not to make state¬ 
ments of fact, but simply to express certain feelings and evoke 
a certain response.” Aesthetic judgments, then, have no objec¬ 
tive validity; they do not, that is to say, state (whether correctly 
or incorrectly) in regard to a particular object that it has value; 
in fact, they do not succeed in saying anything about the object 
at all. What they intimate is that the person who makes the 
judgment has certain feelings. Aesthetic value judgments, 
being meaningless, cannot be argued about. Hence, it means 
nothing to say that Beethoven is a greater musician than Mr. 
Gershwin, and no relevant arguments can be produced to show 
that he is. 

Similarly also with religion. We cannot either (1) prove the 
existence of God, or (2) show it to be probable. 

As to (1), this follows from Ayer’s general position. Em¬ 
pirical propositions are not certain but only probable; there¬ 
fore, if propositions about God were empirical, were, that is to 
say, based on evidence, they would have no more than prob¬ 
ability value. In so far as the a priori proofs, for example, the 
ontological proof of God’s existence are concerned, these, being 
analytic, are only tautologies. 

As to (2), if the existence of God were probable, then the 
proposition that He existed would be empirical. “In that case”, 
says Ayer, “it would be possible to deduce from it, and other 
empirical hypotheses, certain experiential propositions which 
were not deducible from those other hypotheses alone. But, in 
fact, this is not possible.” If, on the other hand, God is a meta¬ 
physical term, if, that is to say, he belongs to a reality which 
transcends the world of sense-experience, He comes under the 
general ban on all metaphysical statements, and to say that He 
exists is neither true nor false. This position, as Ayer is careful 
to point out, is neither atheist nor agnostic; it cuts deeper than 
either, by asserting that all talk about God, whether pro or 
anti, is twaddle. These are examples of the application of the 
methods of logical analysis to the conclusions of what I have 
called the dominant tradition in philosophy. 

1 The emotive theory of ethics is considered in detail in ch. VIII. 


CHAPTER II 


PHYSICAL THINGS AND OUR KNOWLEDGE 
OF THEM 

Ayer makes three kinds of statements about physical things. 

(a) They are metaphysical and not, therefore, real entities. 

(b) They are logical constructions out of sense-contents in the 
sense that all statements in which, for example, the symbol, that 
is the word for a physical thing occurs can be translated into 
other statements having the same meaning, which contain words 
which symbolize other sorts of things, namely, sense-contents. 

(c) That no such thing as a physical thing is, therefore experi¬ 
enced. 

(i) Element of Dogmatism Involved 
My first comment is that the assertion that a physical thing is 
analysable apparently without remainder into sense-contents or, 
more precisely,that statements about it are analysable into other 
statements containing words which symbolize sense-contents 
is a dogma for which no sufficient reasons are given. To assert 
that what I mean when I say, “this is a table”, is wholly analys¬ 
able into sense-contents is certainly false, if it is taken as an 
account of what I believe myself to be meaning when I make this 
assertion. For I am certain that what I believe myself to mean is 
not merely that if I were to put my hand in a certain position 
I should experience certain sense-contents, if I were to walk in 
a certain direction, others, if I were to close an eye, yet others 
and so on; I am certain, that is to say, that what I believe 
myself to mean is not wholly definable in terms of actual and pos¬ 
sible sense-experiences. I am certain that I also believe myself 
to mean that there is a physical thing, a table, which is the cause 
of these sense-experiences. Nor is any purpose served by telling 
me that I do not mean this, when I am quite sure that I do. 

But the relevant question may be not, “is this what I believe 
myself to mean?” but “is this what I ought to believe myself to 
mean”, leading to the further question, “is this what I do in 

s 2 


PHYSICAL THINGS AND OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THEM 33 

fact mean?” Ayer’s main reason for saying that I ought not to 
believe myself to mean this, derives from his ban on “meta¬ 
physical” objects, a ban which in its turn is derived from the 
principle of verification to be considered in the next chapter. 

Now it may be the case—strong arguments can, indeed, be 
adduced for supposing that it is the case—that when I say 
“this is a table”, making what is prima facie a statement about 
an external object, it is only by making certain observations, 
observations which may be analysed in terms of sense-experi¬ 
ences that I can verify my statement. But to deduce from the 
fact that it is only by having certain sense-experiences that I 
can verify my statement that the meaning of the statement is 
the mode of its verification is a dogma. 1 Nor is any sufficient 
ground given for identifying the meaning of a proposition as 
Ayer does, with “the observations which would lead” me 
“under certain conditions to accept the proposition as being 
true or reject it as being false”. 

(2) Reduction to Solipsism 

If to say, “this is a table” means, “I am having and may have 
certain sense-experiences” or, as Ayer puts it, that I know that 
some “possible sense-experience” would “be relevant to the de¬ 
termination of the truth or falsehood” of the statement, and if 
this is all that it means, if, in other words, my knowledge of the 
table is completely analysable into actual and possible sense- 
contents, then I do not see how it is possible to resist a reduc¬ 
tion of the position to Solipsism. Ayer says that he is not a 
solipsist and from time to time seeks to defend himself against 
the charge. Let us, however, consider the implications of the 
following propositions: 

(a) “Material things are constituted by sense-contents”, 
although sense-contents are not parts of material things. To say 
that “things” are constituted by sense-content entails that 
things are logical constructions 2 statements about which are 
reducible to statements about sense-contents. 

(b) The term “sense-content” is used “to refer to the im¬ 
mediate data not merely of ‘outer’ but also of ‘introspective’ 
sensation”. 

(c) Sense-contents are parts of experience: “We define a 

1 The dogma is, in fact, the principle of verification which is examined in ch. III. 

2 See ch. V, pp. 79-86, for an account and criticism of the doctrine of logical 
constructions. 


34 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

sense-content not as the object, but as a part of a sense-experi¬ 
ence. And from this it follows that the existence of a sense- 
content always entails the existence of a sense-experience.” 

If in the light of these statements we put the question, “what 
is it that I know when I think I am knowing a material thing?”, 
Ayer’s answer is that I am knowing sense-contents which are a 
part of my sense-experience. Since all our knowledge of the 
external world is analysed in this way, I conclude that the 
resultant position is that of Solipsism. 

(A similar difficulty attaches to Ayer’s treatment of the self, 
a treatment which, in my view, is open to a similar criticism. I 
urge this criticism in another chapter.) 1 

Ayer, as I have said, seeks to defend himself against the 
charge of Solipsism. “It appears”, he writes, “that the fact that 
a man’s sense-experiences are private to himself, inasmuch 
as each of them contains an organic sense-content which 
belongs to his body and to no other, is perfectly compatible 
with his having good reason to believe in the existence of 
other men.” 

Now other men are defined “in terms of the actual and 
hypothetical occurrence of certain sense-contents”. Whose 
sense-contents? The answer, presumably, is “those of the 
percipient”; in point of fact, Ayer specifies them as the “sense- 
contents” which “occur in his”—presumably the percipient’s— 
“sense-history”. I believe, then, in the existence of other people 
because of events occurring in my sense-history and when I 
believe myself to know other people, what I know are, again, 
appropriate sense-contents occurring in my sense-history. In 
answer to the question, why if this is so, we all believe ourselves 
to inhabit a common world and contrive to understand each 
other, Ayer gives as his reason for the belief that “each of us 
observes the behaviour on the part of himself and others which 
constitutes the requisite understanding”. This implies that 
one of my reasons for believing in the existence of another 
person and for believing that I can communicate with him and 
that he understands me, is that I can observe in his behaviour 
the changes which are appropriate on the assumption and only 
on the assumption that he has a body and that he understands 
me. Observation of behaviour, means observation of action and 
speech; it means seeing what a body does and hearing the noises 
1 See ch. VII, pp. 103-105. 


PHYSICAL THINGS AND OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THEM 35 

that it makes. What, then, is a body and what are noises? 
Answer, on Ayer’s view, logical constructions from sense- 
contents. From whose sense-contents? Presumably, from my 
own, for it would be absurd to say that the physical things I 
believe myself to observe are logical constructions from some¬ 
body else’s sense-contents. Therefore, the behaviour of other 
bodies including the noises they make when their owner’s 
speak are verified by the occurrence—the words are Ayer’s— 
“in my sense-history of the appropriate series of sense-contents”. 
Hence, to know your behaviour in general and to know in 
particular the changes in it which are appropriate to your 
understanding of what I say is to experience my sense-contents. 
To put it tersely, to know you is to experience myself. This 
seems to me to be a succinct statement of the position commonly 
known as Solipsism. 

(3) Analysis of the Data of Perception into Sense-Contents 
The question may be asked, what reasons are given for 
supposing that what I call my experience of the table is an 
experience of or, as Ayer would prefer to put it, is the occurrence 
of sense-contents. The answer is none; at least none are given 
in Language , Truth and Logic. Ayer’s view on this topic is, 
therefore, a dogmatic view. I call it dogmatic, because the 
question of the correct analysis of sense-perception has pre¬ 
occupied philosophers since philosophy began and never more 
intensively than during the present century. On the whole it 
may be said that the dominant philosophical tradition has been 
idealist; that is to say, most philosophers have held that what 
is immediately apprehended in sense-experience is either 
mental or is at least mind-dependent, and is not, therefore, an 
entity belonging to an external physical world which exists 
independently of the mind’s apprehension of it. 

About the beginning of this century a reaction took place 
initiated by Professor Moore’s celebrated essay, The Refutation 
of Idealism , and for the next twenty years the dominant tradi¬ 
tion was realist. 

Professor Moore to whom, in other connexions, Ayer refers 
with respect 1 distinguished the act of apprehension from the 
object apprehended, insisting that, while the first is mental, the 
second need not be. Ayer apparently rejects this view without 

1 “I have learned a great deal from Professor Moore.” 


36 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

discussion. The act itself he denies as inaccessible to observa¬ 
tion, while the view that what is immediately given in sense- 
experience consists of sense-contents he apparently takes for 
granted. Now, without giving one’s reasons it is dogmatic 
to adopt a particular view in regard to a controversial 
issue, as if it were the only view which any reasonable man 
could hold. 

Dogma for dogma, I should reply that what I immediately 
apprehend in sense-experience is not a sense-content which is 
a part of my experience, but is an entity external to myself, a 
patch of colour, a shape or a sound. I should maintain that I 
also know—though I know this in a different way from that in 
which I know the patches of colour, the shapes and the sounds 
—that these data that I immediately apprehend stand in a 
peculiarly close and distinctive relation to physical objects. I do 
not propose to try to defend these contentions here. It is 
sufficient for my purpose to point out that many competent 
philosophers have maintained them, adducing good arguments 
in their support. These arguments Ayer brushes aside and 
rejects without discussion the position they are designed to 
support. Many of his conclusions on other matters depend 
in their turn upon this rejection, depend, that is to say, upon 
the dogma that what we know in sense-experience consists 
exclusively of sense-contents. 

As to the act of apprehension, which he denies, this I should 
say is on occasion directly accessible to introspection, as when 
I deliberately look at and consciously take in the details of some 
scene that is presented to me, and that it is only the dogma 
that experience consists exclusively of sense-contents that blinds 
Ayer to this obvious fact. 

(4) Contradictory Statements 

In general I have the impression that some of Ayer’s state¬ 
ments about the existence of material things are contradictory 
and that no clear doctrine, therefore, emerges. I say that “I 
have the impression”, since it may well be that I have failed to 
understand Ayer’s position. I propose, then, to summarize with 
comments some statements which bear upon this topic. 

(a) Ayer accepts the phenomenalist analysis of a material 
thing. To say “this is a thing” he holds, is equivalent to saying 
“certain sense-contents are observed and others are in theory 


PHYSICAL THINGS AND OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THEM 37 

observable” and means no more than this. On this I have 
commented: (i) That this is certainly not what I believe myself 
to mean when I say “this is a table”. In addition to “I am 
having certain sense-contents” and “I shall have others, if I 
move my body in certain ways”, I mean also “there is a 
physical thing, a table, which causes these sense-contents” (I 
happen also to believe that I have a direct and immediate 
acquaintance with or awareness of the table, but my own 
theory of perception is not here under discussion), (ii) It is 
difficult to see how Solipsism can be avoided, since all state¬ 
ments which purport to be about a public, common world 
turn out on analysis to be statements about sense-contents, 
which are, presumably, private to the self of the experiencing 
percipient. (This, of course, presupposes that there is a self to 
have the experiences, as to which see Chapter VII, pp. 101-102.) 

( b ) From time to time Ayer, nevertheless, speaks of material 
things, as if they existed in a straightforward sense, not, that is 
to say, as if they were logical constructions or as if they con¬ 
sisted merely of sense-contents. For example, he criticizes 
writers on the subject of perception for assuming that “unless 
one can give a satisfactory analysis of perceptual situations, one 
is not entitled to believe in the existence of material things”. 
What he means is, I think, that one is entitled to believe in 
the existence of material things, even if one cannot give a satis¬ 
factory account of a perceptual situation, a presumption that is 
strengthened by the immediately following remark, “the 
philosopher has no right to despise the beliefs of common 
sense”. Now, if there are no material things but only logical 
construction and/or sense-contents, the beliefs of common 
sense are certainly wrong and ought to be despised. Moreover, 
that Ayer does, indeed, think that one is entitled to believe 
in the existence of material things follows, as it seems to me, 
from his statement that “what gives one the right to believe 
in the existence of a certain material thing is simply the fact 
that one has certain sensations”. We are further told that the 
existence of unobserved events can be inferred and that it is for 
physical science to say whether the correct analysis of the 
external world is in terms of things or of events. This seems to 
imply that something, whether event or thing, occurs (or 
exists) in the external world, the event or thing being other 
than my sense-contents. 


38 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

The following questions arise: 

(i) How can the statements under {a) be reconciled with 
those which I have summarized under ( b )? (ii) We are told 
that it is by the help of principles obtained inductively that we 
infer the existence of things and/or events. I have summarized 
and criticized in another chapter Ayer’s account of the prin¬ 
ciple of induction. 1 For the present, I confine myself to asking 
what principle, inductive or otherwise, could possibly entitle 
me to infer the existence of that which is not and, presumably, 
cannot be experienced, namely, a material thing from that 
which is, namely, a sense-content especially when the un¬ 
experienced something is conceived to be of an entirely different 
order from the sense-contents which are, in fact, experienced? 

I suggest that Ayer’s material things and unobserved events 
belong to the same category as Locke’s substance and that all 
the familiar criticisms historically urged against Locke’s con¬ 
ception may, with equal justice, be applied to them. 

“ Ostensive ” Propositions 

Connected with the questions, are there physical things and 
can I know them is the question, what is it that I am immediate¬ 
ly aware of in sense-experience? Ayer discusses in this connexion 
the question whether there are “ostensive” propositions, that 
is to say, propositions which directly record an immediate 
experience, such as, for example, “this is white” or “this is 
painful”. Such propositions are usually regarded as certain and 
irrefutable and many philosophers whose views in general 
follow Ayer’s have held that all other empirical propositions 
are hypotheses deriving such validity as they possess from their 
relationship to “ostensive” propositions. 

Now, many, perhaps most of those philosophers, who share 
Ayer’s views on other matters have held that there are “osten¬ 
sive” propositions in this sense. 

Ayer, however, contended in the first edition of his book 2 that 

1 See ch. VI., pp. 89-90. 

2 This conclusion is withdrawn in the Introduction to the second edition of 
Language , Truth and Logic. Ayer now maintains, or did when he wrote the Intro¬ 
duction, that there are some empirical propositions which “can be verified con¬ 
clusively”. These he calls “basic” propositions; they are defined as referring 
“solely to the content of a single experience, and what may be said to verify them 
conclusively is the occurrence of the experience to which they uniquely refer”, 
bio examples are given but Ayer is, presumably, thinking of such propositions as, 
“this is white”, the case he cites as an example in the text of the original edition, 
where “this” is a sense-content. We may, he says, be mistaken in regard to these 


PHYSICAL THINGS AND OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THEM 39 

no empirical propositions are certain and was accordingly, 
committed to a denial of “ostensive” propositions, to a denial, 
then, that there are any propositions which directly record an 
immediate experience on the ground that you cannot in lan¬ 
guage point to an object without describing it and that directly 
you begin to describe, you pass beyond the mere registration of 
sense-contents. He takes as an example, “this is white” and 
contends that what I am asserting when I say “this is white” 
is that this sense-content “is similar in colour to certain other 
sense-contents, namely, those which I should call, or actually 
have called, white”. 

On this I have two comments. First, this is certainly not what 
I mean to assert when I say “this is white” and no reason, so far 
as I can see, is given for supposing that that is what I am, in fact, 
asserting. Secondly, if to say of a sense-content ( a ) that it is 
white is to say that it is similar to sense-contents ( b ), ( c ) and ( d) } 
which I call or have called white, and to say of sense-content 
( b ) that it is white is to say that it is similar to sense-contents (a) 

(i c ), ( d ) and (e), which I call or have called white, and so on 
with regard to all other so-called white sense-contents, the 
property of being white is reduced to a relation of similarity 
between sense-contents which must themselves be without the 
property, since the property of being white has been earmarked 
for the relation. If the sense-contents are without the property, 
the property, namely, of being white, they can be shown 

propositions in a verbal sense; we may, that is to say, misdescribe our experience, 
but provided we “do no more than record what is experienced” we cannot, 
he now holds, be factually mistaken about it. 

But to know that a basic proposition is true, is not, he points out, to know 
anything which is either new or important; indeed, it is to “obtain no further 
knowledge than what is already afforded by the occurrence of the relevant 
experience”. 

I am not wholly clear as to the meaning of this phrase. The expression “further 
knowledge” suggests that “the occurrence of the relevant experience” in itself 
constitutes knowledge. If we were to say with Hegel that all consciousness is self 
consciousness, the view that the having of an experience in itself constitutes 
knowledge might well be tenable. But this is certainly not Ayer’s view nor, on 
his premises, is it easy to see how the occurrence of a sense-content can be described 
as knowledge. 

This issue raises large questions which cannot be pursued here. The adoption 
in the revised edition of the view that there are “basic” propositions entails the 
abandonment of the view maintained in the first edition that there are no “osten¬ 
sive” propositions and this view is, in fact, explicitly abandoned. However, as I 
pointed out in the Introduction, it is the doctrines originally stated in the first 
edition of Language , Truth and Logic that have caught the imagination of young 
philosophers, rather than the modifications of these doctrines contained in the 
second. The text is, therefore, devoted to an examination of the original denial 
of “ostensive” propositions. 


40 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

by similar arguments to be without any specifiable property; 
but if they are without any specifiable property, by what 
method of selection and discrimination are they classed together 
in the special relation, the relation, namely, of similarity, into 
which the property of being white has been analysed? Further¬ 
more, if white is a relation of similarity holding between 
featureless sense-contents and black is a relation holding 
between other featureless sense-contents, how is white dis¬ 
tinguished from black? More generally, how is one sense- 
content distinguished from another. It is not clear why the 
obvious analysis of the proposition, “this is white”, namely, that 
it predicates a quality or an attribute of a subject, is rejected 
without discussion. No doubt it has difficulties of its own, but 
they do not seem to me to be so formidable as those involved 
in the analysis of the proposition, “this is white”, into the 
assertion of a relation of similarity between what, if I am right, 
are featureless sense-contents. I can only suppose that Ayer has 
been led to put forward this perplexing analysis of the pro¬ 
position “this is white” in the interests of the preconceived 
dogma that no empirical propositions are certain. 

Is it Consistently Maintained that there are no Certain Empirical 
Propositions? 

Nor, I think, does he succeed in consistently maintaining the 
dogma. In the course of his discussion of “ostensive” proposi¬ 
tions, he denies, as we have seen, that there are any proposi¬ 
tions which do, in fact, record an immediate experience and 
deduces the conclusion that there is no certain basis for empiri¬ 
cal knowledge. The most that we are entitled to claim for any 
such knowledge is that it is probable. But though apparently 
we cannot make any certain statement about the content of a 
sense-experience, we are, it seems, entitled to affirm with cer¬ 
tainty that a sense-content occurs—“we do not deny, indeed, 
that a given sense-content can legitimately be said to be 
experienced by a particular subject”—and to make, therefore, 
at least one certain statement about sense-contents. 

Admittedly, “being experienced by a particular subject” 
is analysed “in terms of the relationship of sense-contents to 
one another”, but this analysis is required by Ayer’s refusal to 
admit a substantial self, and is not intended to suggest a 
doubt as to whether sense-contents are in fact experienced. (In 


PHYSICAL THINGS AND OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THEM 41 

fact, we are explicitly told later that to say that a sense-experi¬ 
ence exists is to say “no more than that it occurs 55 .) However, 
it turns out that this is not all that we are entitled certainly to 
say about sense-contents, for we are, further, told “the existence 
of a sense-content always entails the existence of a sense- 
experience 55 . 

Now it might be urged that this last statement is an analytic 
statement and, therefore, a tautology; but whether it is so or 
not depends, I venture to suggest, upon the way in which the 
expressions sense-content and sense-experience are defined. 

Ayer’s definition of a sense-content is “an entity which is 
sensibly given 55 but no definition of sense-experience is offered. 
If I am right in supposing that there are some senses of the 
expression “sense-experience 55 , such that, if the expression 
“sense-experience 55 were employed in these senses, the statement 
would not be a tautology, then the statement would appear to 
constitute another example of an empirical proposition which is 
certain. 

Privileged Positions 

Before I leave Ayer’s account of perception I would like to 
touch upon one matter of fact. In his discussion of perception 
Ayer considers the question, why it is that, on his view as to the 
nature of physical objects, the view, namely, that a coin is a 
logical construction from a number of sense-contents, we all 
agree to call the coin round. His answer to the question is that 
“roundness of shape characterizes those elements of the coin 
which are experienced from the point of view from which 
measurements of shape are most conveniently carried out 55 . 
Now, there are, I suggest, two and just two positions which can 
be occupied by eyes, from which the coin appears round, the 
position which is vertically above and the position which is 
vertically below the coin. (I am obliged here to have recourse 
to common-sense language about the coin and about eyes, 
not because, on Ayer’s view, such language is justified, for how 
one wonders can a pair of eyes which are logical constructions 
stand in a spatial relation to a coin, which is also a logical con¬ 
struction, but because he himself uses such language, since he 
“measures” the shapes of coins just as if he supposed them to be 
ordinary physical things.) The question may be asked, is it, 
in fact, the case that these two positions are the positions from 


42 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

which measurements of shape are most conveniently carried 
out? It is highly doubtful. I should have thought that most 
people when they measured a coin would put it on a table, or 
hold it in front of them; that is to say, they measure it from posi¬ 
tions in which it appears elliptical. But how in any event is this 
conclusion, the conclusion, namely, in regard to what may be 
called the privileged position—a penny is called “round” 
because a round sense-content is experienced from a privileged 
position, that position, namely, from which measurements can 
be most conveniently carried out—apply to other sense-contents, 
to smell-contents, for example, to taste-contents, or to sound- 
contents? It is a commonplace that things “smell” differently 
at different times of the day and that their smell varies rela¬ 
tively to the state of the olfactory organs. What, then, on Ayer’s 
view, is the reason for saying that honey smells sweet and 
vinegar sour? Again, a burgundy which tastes sour when drunk 
alone, or after a chocolate mousse , tastes sweet with brie. How, 
then, on Ayer’s view, determine the taste of the burgundy? 
Again, what is meant by saying that a sound is loud or soft, 
seeing that its loudness or softness varies with the distance of its 
place of origin from the hearer? What, in other words, is the 
“privileged” position from which as a result of having most 
“conveniently measured” smells and sounds, we judge that 
honey smells sweet and vinegar sour, that a burgundy has a 
fine bouquet and that a trumpet is noisy? 

I cannot explore these difficulties here. They constitute one 
of many reasons for thinking that Ayer’s account of perception 
is based too exclusively upon a consideration of visual sense- 
contents. 


CHAPTER III 


THE PRINCIPLE OF VERIFIABILITY 


Statement of the Principle 

This, the most distinctive principle of Logical Positivism, 
asserts that the meaning of an empirical proposition is the mode 
of its verification. Ayer’s statement of the principle is as 
follows: “We say that a sentence is factually significant to any 
given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the 
proposition which it purports to express.” Elsewhere he states 
that if a sentence expresses “a genuine empirical hypothesis” 
—by which, presumably, is meant among other things , if a 
sentence is to have meaning—it is required “not that it should 
be conclusively verifiable, but that some possible sense-experi¬ 
ence should be relevant to the determination of its truth or 
falsehood”. 

Now what I think Ayer really wishes to assert is that an 
empirical statement has meaning, only if it is capable of being 
verified by a procedure of a particular kind. “A simple way to 
formulate the principle”, he says in the Introduction to the 
1946 edition of his book, “would be to say that a sentence had 
literal meaning if, and only if, the proposition it expressed was 
either analytic or empirically verifiable.” By “empirically veri¬ 
fiable” is meant verifiable by the occurrence of certain sensory- 
experiences. He further calls the principle a “criterion of 
meaning”. Ayer, then, is making an assertion about the con¬ 
ditions which must be satisfied, if an empirical statement is to 
have meaning. In point of fact, however, the distinction be¬ 
tween assertions as to the meaning of a statement and assertions 
as to the conditions which must be satisfied if it is to have 
meaning, a distinction which, one would have thought, it was 
vitally important to maintain, is frequently blurred. Thus, 
Ayer tells us that the function of philosophical analysis is to 
show how statements containing certain types of expression, as, 
for example, table or chair, can be replaced by equivalent 

43 


44 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

statements which omit these expressions and refer only to 
actual or possible sensory observations. He puts this as we 
have seen 1 by saying that “the philosopher is primarily con¬ 
cerned with the provision not of explicit definitions”, that is to 
say, the sort of definition, which you might expect to find in a 
dictionary, “but of definitions in use”. The view that statements 
of the first kind are replaceable and should be replaced by 
statements of the second entails that the meaning of statements 
about material things is entirely expressible in terms of actual 
or possible statements of verification—to take a particular 
example, that the meaning of the statement “this is a chair” is 
entirely expressible in terms of the actual or possible sense- 
experiences which would verify the statement. Ayer puts this 
explicitly when he says: “We know that it must be possible to 
define material things in terms of sense-contents, because it is 
only by the occurrence of certain sense-contents that the 
existence of any material thing can ever be in the least degree 
verified.” 

Variations in Statement of the Principle 
Now, to say that we can define a thing in terms of sense- 
contents is equivalent to saying that the meaning of any 
statement made about it is expressible in terms of statements 
about the sense-contents by which its existence is verified. 
Hence, although Ayer professedly puts forward the verification 
principle, sometimes as a criterion of meaning, sometimes as a 
principle prescribing the conditions under which a statement 
can be said to have meaning, the use to which he puts it implies 
that the mode of verifying a statement about a material thing, 
that is to say, the making of certain observations and the 
having as a result of certain sensory experiences, is the meaning 
of the statement. This I take to be the intention of the rather 
cryptic observation contained in the Introduction of the 1946 
edition, “from the fact that it is only by the making of some 
observation that any statement about a material thing can be 
directly verified ... it follows also that, although its generality 
may prevent any finite set of observation-statements from 
exhausting its meaning, it does not contain anything as part 
of its meaning that cannot be represented as an observation 
statement”. I think we may fairly put this by saying that the 
1 See ch. I, p. 25. 


THE PRINCIPLE OF VERIFIABILITY 45 

meaning of any statement about a material thing consists of 
the observation statements by which the original statement is 
verified. Ayer concludes this passage by saying that he wishes 
“the principle of verification ... to be regarded, not as an 
empirical hypothesis, but as a definition”, a definition pre¬ 
sumably, of meaning. 

Now, to say that it is by the occurrence of sense-contents 
that the existence of a material thing is verified seems to me 
different from saying that a material thing can be defined in 
terms of the sense-contents that verify it. Without giving any 
explanation Ayer appears to assume that the two statements 
mean the same. They may mean the same, if the correct 
analysis of a material thing is in terms of sense-contents, but, 
as I have already ventured to suggest, 1 that this is the correct 
analysis of it is a dogma. Most people would insist that while it 
may be true that it is only in terms of sense-contents that a 
thing is known , the fact that it is known implies that there is 
also a thing to be the cause of the sense-contents. 

A further distinction should, as it seems to me, be made 
between the conditions under which a statement can be said to 
have meaning and the procedure adopted for determining that 
meaning. Thus, if I say “this is a table”, part of the meaning 
of my statement is, according to Ayer, that, if my body were to 
move in a certain direction, I should have certain specifiable 
experiences. 

In other words, in making this statement, I am indicating 
some of the conditions which, on Ayer’s view, must be satisfied, 
if my statement is to have meaning and if I am to know what 
it is. Other parts of the meaning of my statement would be 
expressed by other statements about the conditions under which 
I should have actual or possible experiences. But to specify the 
conditions which must be satisfied if a statement is to have 
meaning is surely different from describing the procedure for 
finding out what the meaning of the statement is. I make this 
point in passing to indicate that the verification principle, far 
from being clear cut and definitive, bears, in effect, a number of 
allied but different meanings. The effectiveness of its applica¬ 
tion to various philosophical problems depends in no small 
measure upon the skill with which it is made to carry which¬ 
ever of these meanings happens to be most immediately 
1 See ch. II, pp. 35, 36. 


46 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

serviceable for the elucidation of the particular problem under 
discussion. 

Some Criticisms 

(1) The first question that suggests itself is, what reasons are 
adduced in support of the principle? The answer is far from 
clear. 

In general, the principle seems to be announced, as if it 
were a self-evident truth that the only possible conditions 
in which an empirical statement can have meaning are that 
it should be verifiable in terms of sensory experience. To say 
that a truth is self-evident does not, of course, mean that it 
must be evident to all people. If, however, important argu¬ 
ments can be advanced against it we are entitled to question 
its claim to self-evidence. 

Not only is no sufficient evidence offered in support of the 
principle, but I venture to doubt whether sufficient evidence 
could be offered. For how, one might ask, could one ever be 
sure that the analysis of the meaning of a proposition about a 
material thing in terms of the sense-contents by which it is 
verified is exhaustive, unless we were in a position to compare 
all the relevant sense-contents with the meaning of the propo¬ 
sition and, having done so, decide that they did, in fact, exhaust 
that meaning. But, in order that we might be in a position to 
make such a comparison, we should require to know the 
meaning independently of the sense-contents which claim to 
exhaust it, so that it could be compared with them and the 
claim of the sense-contents to exhaust the meaning seen to be 
valid. But to know the meaning independently of the sense- 
contents is precisely what Logical Positivism declares to be 
impossible. 

(2) The Difficulty of the Infinite Regress 

The verification principle states that the meaning of an 
empirical statement is expressible entirely in terms of actual or 
possible verificatory statements, these in their turn being state¬ 
ments to the effect that certain sense-contents are occurring. 
Putting this shortly and leaving out certain not immediately 
relevant qualifications, we may say that the meaning of the 
statement, “this is a table”, is expressible in terms of a number 
of statements to the effect that I am experiencing or could 


THE PRINCIPLE OF VERIFIABILITY 47 

experience certain sense-contents, or, more precisely, that 
certain sense-contents are occurring or could occur. 

What, then, is the meaning of the statement, “certain sense- 
contents are occurring”? Since the statement is an empirical 
one its meaning is, presumably, expressible in terms of veri- 
ficatory statements, that is in terms of statements to the effect 
that certain other sense-contents are occurring or could occur. 
The meaning of this statement is presumably expressible in 
terms of yet other sense-contents so that an infinite regress 
of verifying sense-contents is, according to the theory, involved 
before the meaning of any statement can be established. I 
do not know that the fact that it involves an infinite regress 
is a fatal objection to the theory, but it does render it highly 
unplausible. 

An equivalent difficulty occurs in other connexions. 

Material objects are, for Ayer, logical constructions. 

I shall consider the theory of logical constructions in the 
fifth chapter. I am here concerned with it only in so far as it 
throws this difficulty into relief. Let e be a symbol, the symbol 
in the case I have just cited being the word “table”. Let us, says 
Ayer, suppose that “all the sentences in which the symbol e 
occurs can be translated into sentences which do not contain 
e itself, or any symbol which is synonymous with e, but do 
contain symbols b, c, d. . . . In such a case we say that e is a 
logical construction out of b, c, d”. 

Now, b, c and d are sense-contents. (The use of the word 
“sense-content” instead of the more normal expression “sensa¬ 
tion” is, I suppose, designed to exclude any necessary references 
to an experiencing self. The expression “sensation” conveys the 
suggestion of a person or self who experiences the sensation; 
but sense-contents may be supposed just to occur without 
occurring to anyone .) 

The “table” is, then, a logical construction out of sense-con- 
tents and the same analysis may be given of any other material 
thing. Hence, when we say “this is a table”, we are, says Ayer, 
making “a linguistic assertion” to the effect that “sentences 
which contain the symbol ‘table 5 , or the corresponding symbol 
in any language which has the same structure as English,, can 
all be translated into sentences of the same language which do 
not contain that symbol, nor any of its synonyms, but do contain 
certain symbols which stand for sense-contents”. This, Ayer 


48 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

goes on, is tantamount to saying that “to say anything about a 
table is always to say something about sense-contents”. 

What, then, are sense-contents? They are, as we have seen , 1 
“the immediate data not merely of ‘outer’ but also of ‘intro¬ 
spective’sensation”. They are also “parts of a sense-experience”. 
I propose, therefore, to put the question, are these immediate 
data which are parts of a sense-experience, things? Ayer, pre¬ 
sumably, would say that they are not on the ground that, if we 
adhere to common-sense language, only the names for collections 
of sense-contents could meaningfully occur in the propositional 
function; “X is a thing”. Thus common sense says “an apple 
is a thing”, but it does not say “rosy patch is a thing”. 

Let us suppose, first, that they are things and, secondly, that 
they are not and see what consequences follow on each supposi¬ 
tion. 

(i) If sense-contents are things, then, presumably, like other 
things they must be regarded as logical constructions. I am, we 
will suppose, looking at and touching a table, and I am trying 
accurately to describe my experiences. Using the phraseology 
which Logical Positivism requires, I shall, presumably, say: “a 
brown and a square and a hard sense-content are occurring”. 

Now, granted Ayer’s denial of “ostensive” propositions , 2 in 
making this statement I am going beyond what is immediately 
given to me in experience. What, in effect, on his view, I am 
saying is that of the sense-contents which are occurring one is 
similar in colour to other sense-contents which I should call 
“brown”, and another is similar to other sense-contents which 
I should call “hard” and so on. Now, these classifications that 
I make whereby I classify my sense-contents as “brown” and 
“hard”, because of their similarity to other sense-contents may, 
as he points out, be mistaken. Hence, in asserting that a brown 
sense-content and a hard sense-content are occurring, I am 
going beyond the facts of immediate experience and laying 
myself open to the possibility of error. In short, as Ayer himself 
puts it, we cannot in language “point to an object without 
describing it”, and the description may be mistaken. 

It seems to follow that the fact that I use words like “brown” 
and “hard” in reference to my sense-contents does not neces¬ 
sarily mean that I am experiencing sense-contents which are 
given as “brown” and “hard”. On the contrary, the use of such 
1 See ch. II, p. 33. 2 See ch. II, pp. 38-40. 


THE PRINCIPLE OF VERIFIABILITY 49 

words means that I am describing my experience and my descrip¬ 
tion may be mistaken. Hence, if I ask myself, what is the nature 
of X, in the case in which X is a sense-content, I must answer 
in terms of the formula which Ayer proposes in the case of other 
“things”. The formula is as follows: all questions of the form, 
“What is the nature of X?” are requests for a definition of a 
symbol in use, and to ask for a definition of a symbol X in use 
is to ask how the sentences in which X occurs are to be trans¬ 
lated into equivalent sentences, which do not contain X or any 
of its synonyms . 1 Hence, I shall answer the question, “what is 
the nature of the sense-content X?” by substituting sentences 
in which the sense-content X disappears and symbols for other 
sense-contents take its place. It is clear that the same procedure 
can be applied in the case of the “other sense-contents” and we 
find ourselves again confronted with an infinite regress. It 
would seem, then, that if we accord the same analysis to sense- 
contents as the verification principle requires us to accord to 
other “things”, the principle involves us in an infinite regress 
before the meaning of any statement about sense-contents, that 
is to say, any empirical statement can be established. 

(ii) Now let us suppose that sense-contents are not things 
and not, therefore, logical constructions, a supposition which 
must be made in spite of Ayer’s denial of “ostensive proposi¬ 
tions”, a denial which would seem to eliminate the possibility 
of making any statements about the primitive data of our 
experience. 

If they are not things, sense-contents occupy a privileged 
position among empirical phenomena, so that the analysis in 
general accorded to the ostensible objects of our experience, 
an analysis which exhibits them as logical constructions, is not 
accorded to sense data. 

If this is the correct interpretation of Ayer’s view, then he 
must be interpreted as saying something like this: (a) all state¬ 
ments about tables are translatable into statements about sense- 
contents; ( b ) statements about sense-contents are not translat¬ 
able into statements about (other) sense-contents. 

If this is Ayer’s meaning, the following two questions suggest 
themselves; (a) Does not his declaration that there are no pro¬ 
positions which directly record an immediate experience require 
him to affirm that propositions of the type, “a brown and a 
1 See the passage quoted in p. 25. 


50 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

hard sense-content are now occurring”, are always in principle 
translatable into other propositions? ( b ) If this is so, on what 
ground does he exempt propositions about sense-contents 
from the analysis accorded to propositions about material things? 

In sum, my difficulty about the status of sense-contents, 
which is also a difficulty in regard to the verification principle, 
may be stated as follows: 

According to Ayer, (a) The meaning of an empirical state¬ 
ment about “things” is expressible in terms of the mode of its 
verification; 

( b) the mode of its verification is the occurrence of actual 
or possible sense-contents; 

(r) Since there are no ostensive propositions, the meaning of 
a statement about sense-contents is expressible in terms of the 
mode of its verification; 

(d) is expressible, therefore, in terms of the occurrence of 
actual or possible sense-contents, statements about which are 
themselves expressible in terms of the occurrence of actual 
or possible sense-contents, and so on ad infinitum. 

How, then, one wonders, is any statement ever verified? 
Also, if meaning is in terms of verification, how is the meaning 
of any statement ever established? 

(3) What is meant by Experience? 

I now come to the question, what is meant by “experience”? 
This question is fundamental, in the sense that if it could be 
shown that the verification principle is defective in respect of 
the meaning which it assigns to “experience”, then the demon¬ 
stration would invalidate the principle. What the principle 
asserts is—I take, again, one of Ayer’s own definitions—“that a 
proposition” is “genuinely factual if any empirical observation 
would be relevant to its truth or falsehood”. Now, the meaning 
normally assigned to “empirical” is sensory and that this is the 
meaning that Ayer assigns to it is, I think, clear, from his use 
of the words “sense-experience”, when he tells us that what he 
requires of an empirical hypothesis is “that some possible sense- 
experience should be relevant to the determination of its truth 
or falsehood”. It follows that intuitive and intellectual experi¬ 
ence, in a word all the wow-sensory experiences of the mind, if, 
indeed, it be admitted that there are such experiences, are not 
deemed to be relevant to the truth or falsehood of empirical 


THE PRINCIPLE OF VERIFIABILITY 51 

propositions. It is not, in other words, by means of intuitive 
and intellectual experience that verification is effected. 

It is, of course, the case that sense-contents are defined as 
the data of “introspective” as well as of “outer” sensation, and 
it is, I suppose, possible to hold that when I know that 
(fl 2 - b 2 ) = (a + b) (a- b) 

and know, too, by what reasoning the relation of equivalence is 
established, my knowledge is a “datum” of introspective sensa¬ 
tion and this too may, I suppose, in theory be maintained in 
regard to my knowledge that “all power corrupts and absolute 
power corrupts absolutely”. But such a view would entail 
among other things that there are introspectively observable 
mental images of all mathematical operations and historical 
generalizations. Now, although I may have a mental image of 
( a 2 — b 2 ) it is, to my mind, certain that I have no mental image 
of its equality with (a + b) (<a — b) } nor can close introspection 
reveal the occurrences of any images of absolute power pro¬ 
ducing absolute corruption in the characters of historical 
personages. Moreover, I doubt whether any psychologist has 
been known to maintain that all intellectual operations are 
exhaustively analysable in terms of mental images. In any event, 
it seems to me nonsense to maintain that the kind of experience 
that is involved in doing mental arithmetic, or in reflecting upon 
the teaching of history, is of the same order as a bona fide 
sensory experience. 

Such refinements need not, however, detain us here for the 
reason that, as one reads logical positivist writings, it becomes 
abundantly clear that the kind of experiences which they 
invoke as relevant to verification are bona fide sensory experi¬ 
ences. 

Materialist Bias 

Logical positivists writings are, indeed, pervaded by a marked 
materialist bias. I am not here speaking of any explicit or 
reasoned belief, but of a general predisposition or tendency 
which leads positivists to write as if they assumed, apparently 
without enquiry, that all mental experiences must have bodily 
causes and have originated in the stimulation of the sense 
organs. Thus, Ayer’s account of the self 1 defines it in terms of 

1 See ch. VII, pp. 101-103, below for a development of this account and for 
a criticism. 


52 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

“organic sense-contents which are elements of the same body ” 
(my italics). The only experiences which on the basis of this 
definition can be allowed to be indubitably mine in the sense 
of belonging to the sense-history of the same self, which is 
myself, are sensory experiences, since, Ayer tells us, it is 
“logically impossible for any organic sense-content to be an 
element of more than one body”. It follows that there is no 
reason to conclude that those experiences, if any, which I 
normally call mine which do not originate in the body really 
belong to or constitute me. (I am not here making the point 
that there are non-sensory experiences or that there are experi¬ 
ences which do not prima facie originate in the body, though it 
seems to me to be obvious that there are. I confine myself to 
drawing attention to the dogmatic assumption, made appar¬ 
ently without any enquiry, that there are not.) I now proceed to 
ask: 

( a ) Are there such experiences? ( b) If there are, why should 
the concept of verificatory experience, which is declared to be 
necessary to the establishment of the meaning and the deter¬ 
mination of the truth or falsehood of “a genuinely factual 
proposition”, arbitrarily exclude them? 

(a) That there are Non-Sensory Experiences 

(i) History. It seems to me that I can reflect upon the facts 
of history. I can, for example, forget a date, try to remember it 
and finally establish it by relating in my mind a fact which I 
know to have occurred in that year to some other fact whose date 
is known to me, which I remember to have taken place a year 
later. “Yes,” I say to myself, “it must have been in April 
1814 that Napoleon retired to Elba because I know that it was 
eleven months later that he landed again in France. And he 
landed in France in March, 1815”. 

Now, this process of reflecting, calculating and relating 
does introspectively occur. It is an experience that I live 
through; the experience does not consist of images and is not 
sensory. 

(ii) Speculative Deliberation . I can do mental arithmetic, work¬ 
ing out sums in my head without the aid of pencil and diagram, 
paper and blackboard—without, that is to say, having sensory 
experience. I can mentally add up a set of remembered figures, 
make a calculation on the basis of the sum I have arrived at, 


THE PRINCIPLE OF VERIFIABILITY 53 

wonder if I have added it up wrong, and check it by adding it 
up again. Moreover, I can do all this in my mind. Once again, 
the processes involved are undoubtedly experienced; I can 
reflect upon them, remember them and dislike them. But, 
they are not sensory. 

(iii) Practical Deliberation. I have, we will suppose, lost my 
spectacles. Where am I to look for them? Are they, I wonder, 
in the drawer? No, because I took them out, when we went 
for our walk. Did I leave them on the shelf of the rock where 
we had lunch? No, I remember putting them on during the 
afternoon to look at a hawk. Did I leave them at the farm-house 
where we had tea? No, because I put them on afterwards to 
look at the time-table on the station platform. They are not in 
my pockets because I have looked thoroughly through them, 
nor are they in my rucksack. “But did you,” I ask myself, 
“look in the flap of the rucksack?” No, I forgot, to look there. 
I look and find them there. 

Now, two separate series of experiences are here involved. 
There is, first, a process of deliberate ratiocination involving 
the elimination of one alternative after the other, until only 
one is left. Secondly, there is the decision to act on the non- 
eliminated alternative, a decision which results in the finding 
of the spectacles. The second set of experiences is at least in part 
sensory, the first is not. Similarly, in chess, I can deliberate for 
an appreciable space of time whether to move the bishop or 
the knight and finally decide to move the knight. 

(iv) Morals. A familiar sequence of experiences is commonly 
described as feeling a temptation to do what one knows to be 
wrong, struggling against it, surrendering to it, doing the wrong 
action and, subsequently, suffering remorse. This sequence of 
experiences is at once so familiar and so interesting that the 
greater part of many famous novels, particularly those written 
in the nineteenth century, is devoted to their description and 
elucidation. 

(v) Aesthetics. When a man reads poetry he undergoes a 
sensory experience, namely, the visual experience of seeing 
black marks on a white background. This, in an imaginative 
young man acts as a cue to other and more varied experiences. 
He dreams dreams, sees visions, indulges in sentimental long¬ 
ings and amorous raptures. It is nonsense to say that these 
experiences do not ever occur to young poetry-readers but only 


54 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

the first experience of those I have mentioned, the experience 
of visual sensation, is a sense-content. 

Moreover, if the cue experience is changed ever so slightly, 
so that instead of reading “Over the Hills and Far Away”, he 
reads “Away and Far Hills the Over”, it may well be the case 
that none of the previously evoked experiences occur. 

Similarly, with pictures. It is a sensory experience which 
informs me that a picture is square, is in a gilt frame and is of 
a woman in a red dress. All these experiences are, if Ayer is 
right, analysable in terms of sense-contents. But the picture 
also moves me aesthetically. It is not easy to find epithets to 
describe this aesthetic effect that the picture produces, but that 
the effect exists, the importance which men attach to art testi¬ 
fies and that it can be described, however inadequately, the 
language of art criticism bears witness. Now, the aesthetic 
effect is not sensory, though the sensory experiences act as a cue 
for its evocation. It could not occur, unless they first occurred, 
but though dependent upon, it is not wholly resolvable into 
them. For by what sense, it may be asked, do we recognize that 
the picture is beautiful and with what sense do we respond 
aesthetically to its beauty? 

Similarly, with music. My senses tell me that a particular 
movement is being played by a violin, and the programme 
informs me that it was composed by Beethoven. But that it is 
lovely, moving, thrilling, wistful or plaintive is conveyed to 
me by no sense. For my part, I should affirm that the aesthetic 
experience can be adequately interpreted only as a direct 
revelation to the apprehending mind of what is, after all, the 
only thing that matters about the music, namely, its beauty. 
But, once again, though this experience, the experience of 
beauty begins with our senses, it transcends its origin in 
sensory experience. 

All these, I suggest, are examples of experience which are 
not themselves sensory or, at least, are not exhaustively analys¬ 
able into the sensory. Now, let us see what account Ayer’s 
principle enables us to give of them. 

(b) Treatment by Ayer of Prima Facie Non-Sensory Experience 

If we grant that these experiences are, at least in part, non- 
sensory, it follows that no sense-experience is relevant to the 
truth or falsehood of the statement that the non-sensory part 


THE PRINCIPLE OF VERIFIABILITY 


55 

of them is occurring. Hence, in so far as they are non-sensory, 
the fact that they occur or rather that the non-sensory part 
of them occurs cannot be verified by sensory experience. Hence, 
if Ayer is right, to say that they occur is meaningless. 

It is, in fact, considerations of precisely this order that Ayer 
adduces, when he wishes to convict metaphysical statements of 
being meaningless. 

Let us see how this conclusion applies to the examples I have 
cited, taking them in order. 

(i) History. History would certainly seem prima facie to con¬ 
stitute a difficulty for the verification principle. Its propositions 
are not known a priori and they are certainly not tautologous; 
also they are synthetic. Sometimes they are particular, as when 
we say, “The battle of Waterloo was fought in 1815”, or that 
absolute power proved fatal to Napoleon; sometimes general, as 
when we say that absolute power always proves fatal to rulers. 
Now, it is extremely difficult to see what sense-observations 
could verify these propositions. The only sensory experiences 
involved in their apprehension are the visual sensations of black 
marks on a white background. But these would seem only to 
verify the empirical proposition, “I am reading a printed page”, 
nor is it easy to see how a present sense-observation could 
verify a past event. Nevertheless, the propositions of history 
are not meaningless—at least, they have not usually been con¬ 
sidered so. 

What account, then, does Ayer give of them? All empirical 
propositions are, for him, hypotheses. The function of an 
empirical hypothesis is “to enable us to anticipate experience” 
and, he says, we test its validity “by seeing whether it actually 
fulfils the function it is designed to fulfil”. The probability 
of an empirical proposition is increased or diminished by 
sensory observations; more precisely, what sensory observation 
does is “to increase our confidence in the proposition as meas¬ 
ured by our willingness to rely on it in practice as a forecast of 
our sensations”. 1 Every synthetic empirical proposition is dis¬ 
tinguished in content from other synthetic empirical proposi¬ 
tions by reason of the fact that it is “relevant to different 
situations”. Propositions referring to the past do not, we are told, 
relevantly differ from other synthetic empirical propositions; 

1 This doctrine of probability, as applied to empirical propositions is considered 
in ch. VI (see pp. 92-8). 


56 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

they, too, are essentially hypothetical and are rules for the 
anticipation of experience. . 

They are distinguished from propositions about the present 
and the future by the criterion of relevance to different situa¬ 
tions. “For my own part,” Ayer concludes, “I do not find 
anything excessively paradoxical in the view that propositions 
about the past are rules for the prediction of those ‘historical’ 
experiences which are commonly said to verify them.” 

The only alternative to his view is, he says, based on the 
tacit or explicit assumption “that the past is somehow ‘object¬ 
ively there’ to be corresponded to—that is to say, it is ‘real’ in 
the metaphysical sense of the term”. Now, this view of the past 
is, of course, ruled out for Ayer, by his rejection of metaphysics. 

In the Introduction to the 1946 edition of his book Ayer 
modified this view, asserting that he did not and does not 
mean that propositions about the past can be translated into 
propositions about the present or future. But while the remarks 
contained in the Introduction to the revised edition are osten¬ 
sibly designed merely to clarify the position adopted in the 
original edition, the account which they convey of propositions 
referring to the past is, in fact, a substantially different account. 
“They are”, Ayer now says, “to be taken as implying that 
certain observations would have occurred if certain conditions 
had been fulfilled.” However, the fact that the conditions 
cannot be fulfilled is only accidental, since it is an accident that 
we happen to be living when we are. Hence, past events are 
“observable in principle” in the same way as events which are 
“remote in space”. Thus, the propositions that the Battle of 
Waterloo was fought in 1815 and that absolute power proved 
fatal to Napoleon have meaning because, if certain conditions 
were fulfilled which cannot be fulfilled in fact, but could be in 
principle, then the propositions in question would be verifiable. 

Comments on Ayer's View of History 

On this view I venture to make the following comments, 
(i) When I make a statement about the past, it is certainly 
not the case that I am saying something which I think will “en¬ 
able me to anticipate future experience”. Ayer may assure me 
that the meaning of my statement is expressible as a “rule for 
the prediction of an ‘historical’ experience”, but this is certainly 
not what I intend the statement to mean. What I intend is to say 


THE PRINCIPLE OF VERIFIABILITY 57 

something about the past. Moreover, I believe that if what I 
say corresponds with something that actually happened in the 
past my statement will be true; if not, not. I further believe 
that it is something of this kind that everybody both intends to 
mean and believes himself to mean, when he makes an historical 
statement and Ayer provides no reason whatever—unless the 
dogma that metaphysics must be nonsense can be accounted a 
reason—for thinking that we are all mistaken in this matter, 
falsely supposing ourselves to say something about the past, 
when what we are really doing is to lay down rules for the 
prediction of the future. 

(ii) As regards the modified version of Ayer’s original 
theory, according to which to say that the Battle of Waterloo 
was fought in 1815 means that certain observations would have 
occurred if certain conditions were to be fulfilled, which could 
in principle be fulfilled, although they cannot be in practice, I 
would suggest that it is only because we already know that the 
Battle of Waterloo was fought in June, 1815, that we are in a 
position to assert that the observations in question would have 
been made, if the conditions in question, namely, the being 
present on the field of Waterloo on June 18 of that year had 
been fulfilled. That is to say, the statement that the Battle of 
Waterloo was fought in 1815 must already have a meaning for 
us in a sense of meaning other than that which Ayer allows and 
we must know what the meaning is, before the statement can 
have meaning for us in Ayer’s sense of having meaning. 

Similarly with the statement that absolute power proved fatal 
to Napoleon. It is only because we already know what the state¬ 
ment means independently of observation, that we know what 
observations would be relevant to its confirmation, if the condi¬ 
tions were fulfilled under which the observations could be made. 

When, however, we proceed to consider generalizations 
about history based on a wide survey of historical fact, such 
as the generalization, absolute power always proves fatal to 
rulers, I do not see how they can or could be verified in sensory 
experience. The generalization could, no doubt, be verified 
in regard to examined cases of particular rulers; but it is obvious 
that all the examples of absolute rulers cannot be examined, 
if only because some of them may occur in the future—while 
as regards past and present cases, one could never be sure that 
one had examined all of them. 


58 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

We have no choice, then, on Ayer’s view, but to dismiss such 
a statement as meaningless. (For all I know to the contrary, 
Ayer may have dismissed all historical generalizations of this 
kind as meaningless.) Yet to say that it is meaningless, or that 
I don’t know what its meaning is, is plainly untrue. 

(iii) But does Ayer’s analysis of historical statements provide 
an even plausible account of what it is that most of us mean by 
history? History, it is obvious, is not just a record of facts; 
it includes their interpretation. From all the facts which are 
available as data the historian selects those which he thinks 
significant, significant, that is to say, for the right understanding 
of the period. Now, what he thinks significant will depend upon 
his view of human nature and its motivation, a view which will 
be at least in part the outcome of his initial temperamental 
make-up. Thus, in analysing the causes of such an event as the 
Peloponnesian War, one historian will emphasize economic 
factors, as, for example, the need of Sparta for outlets for trade 
and of Athens to provide work for the growing body of unem¬ 
ployed at the Peiraeus, another back stairs influences and palace 
intrigues, while another will lay stress upon the influence of the 
personalities of the leading figures of the time. Now the facts 
upon which a historian’s interpretation of a period is based 
may be such as to support any one of these different interpre¬ 
tations. It is from such material, material subjectively selected 
in the light of preconceived notions as to the respective parts 
played in the causation of events by human will and motive 
on the one hand and economic factors on the other that the 
picture of an historical period is built up. One picture will 
differ from another by reason of the varying degrees of influence 
accorded respectively to personalities and circumstance. Now, 
it is upon the pictures that historians have painted that our 
understanding of history is based. I am stressing, then, the 
subjective factors in the writing of history, factors which are, 
for*example, responsible for the totally different assessments of 
the character and motives of James II in the works of Macaulay 
and Hilaire Belloc. 

Now in regard to what I have called the picture of an his¬ 
torical period two points may relevantly be made: first, its 
truth is not verifiable by any conceivable sensory experience. 
Secondly, its accuracy is not capable of proof or disproof. It 
does not, however, follow that it has no meaning, and it does 


THE PRINCIPLE OF VERIFIABILITY 59 

not follow that one picture may not correspond more closely 
than another to the facts, as when we say that Hume’s History 
of England is now superseded in the light of more recently dis¬ 
covered material. Why is Hume’s history superseded? Because, 
presumably, we now know that it gives a less accurate picture 
of the period to which it relates than do others that have 
succeeded it. But any reputable historical picture, whether it 
be more or less accurate, will have meaning. Hume’s history, 
therefore, and the picture of England under the Plantagenets 
which it presents have meaning. Now, for neither of these two 
properties, the property of having meaning and the property of 
more closely corresponding, does Ayer’s account make pro¬ 
vision. 

This failure to make provision for the greater or less accuracy 
of an historical interpretation, or—to put the point with greater 
precision—the failure to allow that the statement “X’s inter¬ 
pretative account of such and such a period has more authority 
than Y’s” has meaning, arises directly from the arbitrary 
limitation of the concept of experience to sensory experience. 
Whether the verification principle is true—if Ayer will allow 
me to use the word—in some of its applications may be open 
to question; but when it asserts that the meaning of all non- 
tautologous statements is expressible in terms of their verifica¬ 
tion by sensory experience, there can, I suggest, be no question 
but that it imposes an arbitrary limitation upon the concept of ex¬ 
perience, as the result of which very few historical statements can, 
if the verification principle is correct, be said to have meaning. 

(ii) and (iii)— Speculative and Practical Deliberation. I took as an 
example of practical deliberation the case in which after a 
period of deliberation I decided in a game of chess to move the 
knight rather than the bishop. When I do, in fact, make the 
move upon which I have decided, altering the position in 
space of my hand and of the piece moved, I have certa'in 
sensory experiences. The proposition that “I moved the 
knight” is verifiable by the sensory experience of others and it 
has, therefore, meaning according to Ayer’s criterion. But the 
process of deliberation which preceded it is not sensory, nor, 
though the decision in which it issues is manifested in overt 
behaviour, is the deliberation that preceded it so manifested; 
indeed, the same movement of the hand and the same move of 


6o 


A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

the piece might have been made without deliberation. Are we, 
then, to say that the process of deliberation did not occur and is 
not experienced because it is not manifested in overt behaviour, 
cannot be observed and does not, therefore, give rise to sensory 
experiences? To do so would be to falsify the facts, since the 
experience of deliberation in such a case is a perfectly familiar 
psychological occurrence. Nevertheless, this, I take it, is what we 
must say, if we insist that statements have meaning only in terms 
of their verification in experience, and that the only experience 
which is relevant to the verification of statements is sensory. 

In the case of what I have called speculative deliberation, it 
is not necessary that there should be any outcome of the delibera¬ 
tion in observable behaviour; often there is not. The process of 
mentally calculating a monetary amount, for example, may 
go on for an appreciable time without any word being spoken, 
nor need any symbol be written at the end of it. 

It seems to me to be clear both that such a process of calcula¬ 
tion is experienced and also that no sensory experience is 
relevant to the verification of the statement that it occurs. 

It is, no doubt true, as I have already remarked, that some 
psychologists hold that the processes involved in doing what is 
called mental arithmetic are accompanied by images. It is also 
true that logical positivists show a disposition to treat mental 
images as if they were sense-contents. But the view that the 
process of working out, for example, an algebraic conclusion in 
the head is exhaustively analysable into the occurrence of a stream 
of mental images is, to put it mildly, controversial—I do not, in 
fact, know of any psychologist who has maintained it—while 
the classification of mental images as sense-contents has little 
to commend it except that Ayer’s theory requires it. 

Unless mathematical calculation consists wholly of mental 
images and unless mental images are sense-contents, the state¬ 
ment that the operation known as “doing” mental arithmetic 
occurs must, on Ayer’s general theory, be dismissed as meaning¬ 
less. 

(iv) and (v )—Ethics and Aesthetics. I shall consider in more 
detail in another chapter Ayer’s treatments of ethics and 
aesthetics. 1 For the present I confine myself to one point. 
The experiences which I undergo in the case of moral conflict 
1 See ch. VIII. 


THE PRINCIPLE OF VERIFIABILITY 6l 

do introspectively take place. If the experiences result in a 
victory over what is known as temptation, no action may be 
taken and there is, therefore, nothing to observe and nothing 
to give rise to sensory experiences. Hence, the statement 
“a struggle against temptation occurred” is, on Ayer’s view, 
meaningless in such a case, because no sensory observation is 
relevant to its verification. If the struggle is unsuccessful, 
action may be taken which is felt at the time to be wrong 
and is subsequently followed by remorse. In this case there 
is overt behaviour, giving rise to sensory experiences both 
in the agent and in the observer of the action. But the occur¬ 
rence of these sensory experiences is relevant to the verification 
only of the statement “such and such an action was performed”; 
it is not relevant to the statement “a process of moral struggle 
occurred while the agent sought to resist the performance of an 
action which he felt to be wrong”. And what ^w^-experience is 
relevant to the verification of the statement “remorse was sub¬ 
sequently felt”? Does Ayer, then, deny that moral struggles 
occur or that remorse is felt, or would he say that the statements 
that the former do occur and that the latter is felt are meaning¬ 
less statements. 

As to aesthetics, it is clear that our reaction to the poetry 
we read or to the music we listen to is far from being exhausted 
by the sensory experiences of seeing marks and hearing noises. 
In addition, there is frequently an emotional experience. But 
the emotional experience is also cognitive. It is, that is to say, 
a knowing of the poetry and of the music upon which the atten¬ 
tion of the mind is directed by the marks and the noises and 
it is this knowing which evokes the emotion. We find it very 
difficult to describe what it is that we are knowing when we 
make use of such expressions as “sublime”, “mysterious”, 
“sombre”, “gay”, “delightful”, “exciting”, and so on, intending 
to designate by these words qualities in the work of art which 
arouse in us the emotions for which the words stand. But, it is, 
I think, clear (a) that the emotions in question are not wholly 
sensory experiences, ( b ) that the qualities which arouse them 
are not wholly sensory qualities—in the case of poetry, for 
example, the only sensory properties involved are those apper¬ 
taining to the character, shape and so on of the printed letters, 
and the colour, shape and texture of the page on which they 
are printed—and ( c ) that the apprehension of them, which, I 


62 


A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

have suggested, is essentially cognitive, is not a sensory appre¬ 
hension. 

This brief account of some of the relevant constituents of 
what we call aesthetic experience suggests that all of them are 
not sensory, and that the qualities of the work upon which 
aesthetic experience is “directed” and to which it is relevant 
are not wholly sensory. Nevertheless, aesthetic experience 
indubitably occurs, so that the limitation of the concept of 
experience to the purely sensory would, on Ayer’s view, convict 
the statement that it does occur of being meaningless. 


CHAPTER IV 


LOGICAL POSITIVISM 
AND THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 

Leaving Ayer’s account of it, I turn to consider the veri¬ 
fication principle on merits. This consideration leads in turn 
to a criticism of the logical positivist theory of knowledge and 
suggests what seems to me to be a disabling flaw in the theory. 

Primafacie we may say that there are two kinds of knowledge, 
knowledge of sensory facts, however analysed, and knowledge of 
non-sensory facts. The former is obtained through—some would 
maintain consists wholly of—sense-experience; the latter does 
not involve—or need not do so—the activity and employment 
of the senses. Knowledge of non-sensory facts is usually divided 
into two categories, analytic and synthetic. Of these, the former 
is regarded by logical positivists as tautologous; the latter as 
meaningless. 

The World as Composed of Sensory Facts 

For logical positivists the world consists only of sensory facts, 
that is to say, of the kind of facts that can be known in sense- 
experience and which belong to the natural world studied by 
science. Thus, Feigl, in an article entitled, Logical Empiricism , 
published in Twentieth Century Philosophy writes: “The term 
‘real’ is employed in a clear sense and usually with good reason 
in daily life and science to designate that which is located 
in space-time and is a link in the chains of causal relations.” 
If this is the case, all propositions which are not tautologous 
will be purely descriptive, descriptive, that is to say, of the 
world “which is located in space-time”; they will tell us what is 
the case in regard to that world and will, therefore, belong to 
the same order as scientific propositions. Most logical positiv¬ 
ists accept this conclusion. If it is true, the only function which 
can be assigned to philosophy is the analysis of science. Hence, 
Carnap says: “Philosophy is to be replaced by the logic of 
science—that is to say, by the logical analysis of the concepts 

6 3 


64 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

and sentences of the sciences, for the logic of science is nothing other 
than the logical syntax of the language of science . . . .” “The non¬ 
metaphysical logic of science also takes a different point of view 
from that of empirical science not, however, because it assumes 
any metaphysical transcendency, but because it makes the 
language forms themselves the objects of a new investigation.” 1 

This view of the function of philosophy is, I suppose, natural 
enough, if the world contains only sensory facts, since science 
consists of the organized knowledge of sensory facts, though 
whether “the concepts and sentences of the sciences” are 
themselves sensory facts, so that the knowledge of them is 
empirical knowledge of the same order as the knowledge that 
science gives, is far from clear. 2 

The corollary of Carnap’s view is that philosophy, as ordin¬ 
arily understood, consists, or at any rate in the past has con¬ 
sisted, very largely of knowledge of the second kind, that is to 
say, of non-sensory knowledge. Let us consider for a moment 
this kind of knowledge that philosophy has been traditionally 
thought to provide or, at least, has been thought capable of 
providing. 

Philosophical Knowledge as Traditionally Conceived 

Granted that the world does not consist entirely of sensory 
facts, granted, then, that there is a non-sensory order of reality, 
it is over against this order that, as Plato would put it, philoso¬ 
phy has traditionally been supposed to be set. Philosophy has 
been thought, in the first place, to concern itself with laws, as 
opposed to the phenomena that exhibit them—with the laws 
of thought, for example, and with the principles of mathe¬ 
matics. It has been thought, in the second place, to concern 
itself with the nature of an ideal world, by reference to which the 
world of sensory facts can be measured and evaluated in respect 
of its worth. In some philosophies, for example, in that of 
Plato, this ideal world is also held to be the real world, reasons 
being given for^supposing that the actual world of sensory fact 
does not possess a full title to be called real. The real world, 
on this view, contains certain forms or principles, those of 
morals and aesthetics, for instance, from which those things 
which in the actual world we call “good” and “beautiful” 

1 R. Carnap, Logical Syntax of Language , p. 277 and p. xiii. 

2 1 have suggested below, see pp. 81-84, that Logical Positivism accords a 
privileged, i.e. non-linguistic, status to words. 


LOGICAL POSITIVISM AND THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 65 

derive such worth as they possess and by reference to which the 
degree of their worth is in principle assessable. Hence, the study 
of the non-sensory order of reality is often termed normative , as 
opposed to the study of the world of sensory fact which is purely 
descriptive. 

To admit that there is non-sensory knowledge entails that 
we know some things a priori ; entails, that is to say, that the 
human mind, reasoning from premises which are taken as 
self-evident in accordance with laws which are intuitively per¬ 
ceived to be true, can obtain knowledge. Sometimes a special 
faculty of the mind is invoked to perform this activity of non- 
sensory knowing. Thus, Plato and Aristotle spoke of uou< and 
we sometimes speak of intellectual inspection. But however 
the faculty be described, and whatever its mode of operation, its 
deliverances have been regarded as essentially “cognitive”. 
They are, that is to say, a knowing of something and the know¬ 
ledge which they give can be stated in propositions which 
assert that “so and so is the case”, propositions, then, which 
may be true or false. The knowledge so obtained may be en¬ 
larged by reasoning and reflection. Among the non-sensory 
“objects” which fall within the scope of the reflective mind’s 
consideration is language, and philosophers have paid consider¬ 
able attention to questions concerning its status and function. 

The Status of the Verification Principle 

All this is denied by Logical Positivism. I propose, then, to 
consider the nature of the affirmations in which Logical 
Positivism itself consists with a view to determining their 
epistemological status. More particularly, I wish to consider 
the verification principle, with a view to determining what kind 
of knowledge it purports to provide. 

In his book, Language , Truth and Logic , Ayer, as we have seen, 1 
divides all meaningful propositions into two classes, those which 
concern matters of empirical fact, and those which are a priori . 

I. Is it an Empirical Principle? 

Is the verification principle, in the first place, a principle 
which concerns matters of empirical fact? There are two con¬ 
siderations which at first sight suggest that it might be so 
regarded. 

1 See ch. I, pp. 28, 29. 

3 


66 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

(a) Ayer lays it down that there are no first principles, if by 
a first principle is meant an intuitively perceived truth upon the 
basis of which a philosopher proceeds to construct a deductive 
system. There are, he thinks, no “objects of speculative know¬ 
ledge” which “yet lie beyond the scope of empirical science”. 

It would seem to follow that, if the principle of verification 
is not a tautology, it must lie within the scope of empirical 
science, and the knowledge of it must, therefore, be reached by 
the methods of empirical science, that is to say inductively. But 
no such method is, in fact, employed by Ayer, nor is it by any 
process of induction that he seeks to establish the principle. 
On the question of the “truth” of general propositions, Ayer 
says: “the most that philosophy can do ... is to show what are 
the criteria which are used to determine the truth or falsehood of 
any given proposition: and then, when the sceptic realizes that 
certain observations would verify his propositions, he may also 
realize that he could make those observations, and so consider 
his original beliefs to be justified”. I am not wholly clear as to 
the meaning of this statement, but its intention appears to be to 
lay down the criteria which justify the holding of “original 
beliefs”. These criteria include the making of certain relevant 
observations. Now, I cannot myself determine what observa¬ 
tions would verify the propositions in which the verification 
principle is expressed—I cannot, that is to say, conceive what 
kind of ^^-experience would verify the principle that the 
meaning of a statement is wholly verifiable in terms of the sense- 
experiences which verify it—nor has anybody, to my knowledge, 
suggested what form such observations could take. I conclude 
that the verification principle is not a principle of the kind to 
which these criteria apply, and that it does not, therefore, con¬ 
form to the conditions which Ayer lays down for a trustworthy 
first principle, namely, that it “must be obtained inductively”. 

( b ) Secondly, the principle is descriptive; it purports that is 
to say, to provide us with a description of meaning; it purports 
to tell us what is the case. It certainly seems, therefore, as if it 
ought to be regarded as an empirical principle belonging to 
the same order as the principles and propositions of science. 
Assuming that it is empirical, there seem to be two possi¬ 
bilities. 

(i) It might be supposed to say something about our own 
psychological states, states which we do undoubtedly experience, 


LOGICAL POSITIVISM AND THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 67 

though not, I insist, with our senses. But if the principle 
merely tells us how the minds of some people, namely, logical 
positivists, work, it would be of purely psychological signifi¬ 
cance and would not merit the attention of philosophers. 

(2) The other possibility is that it tells us something about 
language. This is, indeed, the case, but the kind of informa¬ 
tion that the propositions of Logical Positivism give us about 
language, if taken as empirical, is not the kind of information 
that logical positivists suppose; more precisely, it is the kind of 
information which the premises of Logical Positivism require, 
but which logical positivists do not allow. 

Again there are two possibilities, (i) First, the verification 
principle might tell us something about language in so far as 
language is an object of sense-experience. It might tell us, for 
example, about the sounds which people make when they speak 
language, or the marks which they make upon paper which are 
the written symbols of language. The first would supply us 
with information about aural, the second about visual sense 
data, but the principle, it is obvious, is not about the noises 
people make when they speak, or the marks they make when 
they write, or rather, it is not only about these, it is also about 
the meaning of these noises and marks; in other words, it is 
concerned with language as a symbol. 

(ii) The other possibility is that the principle might give us 
information about the way in which a language is normally 
used. But if this were so, the principle would not permit us to 
draw any philosophical deductions, as for example, the deduction 
that metaphysics is nonsense. Nor, if this were so, would it be 
easy to see how the verification principle could be distinguished 
from the principles of grammar and syntax. It is true that 
Carnap, in the quotation cited above, 1 proposes that philosophy 
should “make the language forms themselves the objects of a 
new investigation”, but he nowhere tells us what the distin¬ 
guishing characteristics of the new investigation would be. 
Nor has anybody, so far as I am aware, at any time suggested 
how this “new investigation” would differ from philological 
investigations, comparative linguistics, or from enquiries into 
the psychology of language. If the verification principle belongs 
neither to psychology nor to grammar nor to philology, what 
alternative remains? 


3 See p. 64. 


68 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

II. Is it a Tautology? 

The other possibility that Ayer’s initial classification of pro¬ 
positions allows, is that the principle is an a priori principle, 
that is to say, that it is a tautology belonging to that category 
of propositions of which those of logic and mathematics are 
cited as pre-eminent examples. 

Now, it is clear in the first place that the verification principle 
is not a principle of logic or of mathematics. Nor, prima facie , 
would it seem to be a tautology. Ayer though he constantly 
uses, does not define the term “tautology”. We are, then, 
entitled to suppose that he is using the word in its customary 
sense, according to which—I quote from the Oxford Dictionary 
—a tautology is a “saying again of what has been said”. Now, 
if we were to ask the question, what is the same thing that, 
having been said once already, is said again by the verification 
principle, I do not know what the answer may be. What, 
then—I venture to repeat the question—is the status of the 
principle? 

Before I suggest an answer, I must say something about the 
statement of the principle contained in the Introduction to the 
revised (1946) edition. 

Treatment of the Principle in the Introduction to the Revised Edition 

It is not in my general intention 1 to deal with the qualifi¬ 
cations of and withdrawals from the doctrine of Logical 
Positivism, as originally stated, which are contained in the 
Introduction to the revised (1946) edition of Ayer’s book. Since, 
however, the question which I have just raised, is the verifi¬ 
cation principle a genuine empirical hypothesis about “matters 
of fact”, or is it analytic and, therefore, tautologous, is there 
by implication answered, I permit myself a word of comment 
on the answer. 

The answer (by implication) is that the principle is not about 
matters of fact, since, says Ayer, it cannot “be either confirmed 
or refuted by any fact of experience”. It follows that it is 
analytic. Ayer calls it explicitly a definition: “I wish the 
principle of verification itself”, he writes, “to be regarded not as 
an empirical hypothesis but as a definition”. Of an analytic 
proposition we are told that it is true “solely in virtue of the 
meaning of its constituent symbols”. Waiving the question 

1 See Introduction, pp. 16, 17, and ch. II, p. 39 (footnote) for the reason for this. 


LOGICAL POSITIVISM AND THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 69 

whether the “constituent symbols” (presumably, words) of the 
verification principle have any meaning at all in the sense of 
meaning allowed by Ayer, that is, of being verifiable in sense- 
experience, the only conclusion which, in the light of this and 
other statements, we seem to be entitled to draw, is that the 
verification principle is after all a tautology. 

[a) If this is, indeed, its character, the following difficulties 
suggest themselves. A tautologous principle does not, we are 
told, make any assertion about the empirical world, but merely 
records our determination to use symbols in a certain fashion. 

Now the verification principle does purport to tell us a great 
deal about the empirical world, as, for example, that the 
meaning of the statement, “there is an empirical world”, is 
verifiable in terms of sense-contents which themselves belong to 
the empirical world. 

( b ) Ayer says that “from a set of tautologies, taken by them¬ 
selves, only further tautologies can be validly deduced”. 
Since no empirical principle is used in addition to the verifica¬ 
tion principle as a premise of logical positivist arguments about 
verification, it seems to follow that the whole structure of argu¬ 
ment and conclusion derived from the verification principle 
consists of tautologies. Therefore, Logical Positivism tells us 
nothing about the world, but only about logical positivists’ 
determination “to use words in a certain fashion”. 

Traditionally philosophy has been studied because it was at 
least thought to be possible that it might give us information 
about the nature of the universe. It is, I must confess, some¬ 
thing of a disappointment to find that it only tells us about the 
way in which a certain number of philosophers has decided to 
use words. At least it would be, if the statement was itself a 
statement of fact, and not, as it turns out to be, only a record 
of the way in which logical positivists have chosen to use words. 
Ayer says that “it would be absurd to put forward a system of 
tautologies as constituting the whole truth about the universe”. 
Logical Positivism does not admittedly purport to tell us the 
whole truth about the universe, but I do not think that those 
who believe in it wish it to be thought that it tells us no truth 
at all, but merely records a set of their linguistic conventions. 
I conclude that the view that the verification principle is a 
tautology is one which Logical Positivism cannot maintain 
consistently with a claim to serious attention. 


JO A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

III. That the Principle is in Fact a Philosophical Principle 

If the principle does not give us information about syntax 
or the sounds of language, if it does not tell us about our own 
psychological states, and if it is not to be dismissed as a mere 
tautology, the only alternative that I can think of is that the 
principle should purport to provide us with a real definition 
of the philosophical status and function of language. Nor, I 
think, can it be doubted that this is what logical positivists 
intend it to do. But if this were indeed the nature of the informa¬ 
tion that it provides, or purports to provide, the principle would 
fall within the category of synthetic a priori propositions, since 
it would give us information about the nature of what is, but 
what is nevertheless not sensory. But such propositions are 
declared to be meaningless by the tenets of Logical Positivism. 

Let me make the point in another way. What is it that we are 
knowing when we know the propositions of philosophy? 
Logical positivists, as we have seen, deny that there is philo¬ 
sophical knowledge of the behaviour or of the nature of things. 
“The propositions of philosophy”, says Ayer, “do not describe 
the behaviour of physical, or even mental objects; they express 
definitions, or the formal consequences of definitions.” And, 
again, “we may speak loosely of” (the philosopher) “as analys¬ 
ing facts, or notions, or even things. But we must make it clear 
that these are simply ways of saying that he is concerned with 
the definition of the corresponding words.” In other words, the 
definitions of philosophy are nominalist only. They give us 
information about the way in which language is used. When, 
therefore, we know a philosophical proposition which appears 
prima facie to tell us something about things , what we are, in fact, 
knowing is “the definition of the corresponding words”; we are 
knowing, then, something about the way in which language is 
used. 

Let us review the verification principle in the light of this 
account of the content of philosophical knowledge. Is it purely 
linguistic? By this question I mean, is the proposition that 
the meaning of an empirical proposition is the mode of its 
verification purely linguistic in the sense that it only tells us 
something about the way in which words are used? The answer, 
I think, is “No”. What the principle purports to do is to tell 
us something about the criterion of meaning in the case of 
empirical propositions. It further goes on to state that those 


LOGICAL POSITIVISM AND THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 71 

propositions to which this criterion is not applicable are either 
tautologous or meaningless. It is clear that this criterion of 
meaning is now an “object” of knowledge which the verifica¬ 
tion principle seeks to define, and that metaphysical propositions 
are a further “object” about which it gives us information, the 
information, namely, that they are tautologous or meaningless. 
The principle, in other words, tells us something about the 
nature of these “objects”, treating them as if they are real and 
can be known. As the result of our knowing of them, we obtain 
information about them which is new, the information, namely, 
that Logical Positivism seeks to convey. What kind of objects, 
then, are these, and what kind of knowledge is it that we are 
supposed to have of them? The knowledge, it is obvious, is not 
empirical nor, I think, would logical positivists regard it as 
tautological. I see no answer, then, to the question, except that 
the knowledge is philosophical, while, as for the “objects” to 
which the knowledge relates, these, it is obvious, are not 
sensory but belong to a non-sensory order of reality. 

Hence, for the verification principle there is claimed, by 
implication, a status which is not only denied to all other 
principles, but which is expressly declared to be mythological 
by the principles of Logical Positivism. Not to put too fine a 
point on it, the verification principle is a metaphysical state¬ 
ment and, therefore, if Logical Positivism is to be believed, 
meaningless. 

Similarly with the statement that whatever can be known 
apart from tautologous propositions is sensory, from which it is 
deduced that there is no non-sensory order of reality or that, if 
there is, we cannot know anything about it. What possible 
grounds could there be for making such an affirmation, which 
did not entail some kind of knowledge of or insight into the 
nature of reality? It could only be such insight, or rather, the 
knowledge which such insight purported to provide, which 
could inform us that there is no non-sensory order of reality. 
Is, then, this proposition, the proposition, namely, that there is 
no non-sensory order of reality, linguistic? Is it, that is to say, 
merely a statement about the way in which words are or should 
be used? I think not. Once again, it purports to tell us some¬ 
thing about the nature of what is. And one of the things that it 
tells us is that the nature of what is is such as to exclude the non- 
sensory. Once again we are presented with what is, in effect, 


7 2 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

a real definition; it is also a synthetic proposition; yet it is not 
empirical and it is not tautologous. Furthermore, it tells us 
something about reality and is, therefore, metaphysical. Finally, 
it is cognitive in the sense that it has reference to and tells us 
about what is other than ourselves and this something which is 
other than ourselves turns out to be non-sensory. In all these 
respects, therefore, such statements as that there is no non- 
sensory order of reality, or that all knowledge is of the same 
kind as scientific knowledge, or that metaphysical propositions 
are meaningless, or that the meaning of an empirical propo¬ 
sition is the mode of its verification offend the fundamental 
principles of Logical Positivism. 

Summary 

The foregoing criticisms point to the same conclusion. 
Logical Positivism accords to its own propositions a privileged 
position which exempts them from the strictures which it 
brings against other philosophical propositions. Emphatically 
it does not do unto others as it would itself be done by. It 
purports to give us cognitive knowledge which is not purely 
descriptive; it makes statements about the nature of things 
which are not purely empirical statements, and while it pur¬ 
ports to be a theory of language, it is, in fact, a theory of meta¬ 
physics. Thus it stigmatizes all metaphysics as nonsense, only 
that it may set up a particular kind of metaphysic. The fact of 
the matter is that Logical Positivism fails to give an account of 
its own activity and in so failing, cuts the ground from under 
its own feet. It can only substantiate its conclusions at the 
cost of stultifying itself for if it is correct in all that it asserts, then 
its assertions, being metaphysical, must be nonsensical. 

Carnap unconsciously exposes this situation when he tells us 
that “metaphysicians cannot avoid making their propositions 
non-verifiable, because if they made them verifiable the deci¬ 
sion about the truth or falsehood of their doctrines would depend 
upon experience and, therefore, belong to the region of 
empirical science”. We have only to apply this dictum to the 
propositions of Logical Positivism and the self-contradictory 
nature of its philosophy stands revealed. 

That what exists is confined to the sensory, that all know¬ 
ledge is of particular facts, that all propositions are either 
empirical or tautologous, that the meaning of an empirical 


LOGICAL POSITIVISM AND THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 73 

proposition is the mode of its verification—all these are propo¬ 
sitions which are non-verifiable. Therefore, if the conclusions 
of Logical Positivism are to be adopted, they are meaningless. 
Wittgenstein, more logical than Carnap, has had the wit or the 
courage to disclose this predicament. He tells us that his own 
writings are nonsense, though he adds that his nonsense is 
important. 

Note on a Proposal 

This is, of course, not the first time that criticisms of this kind 
have been urged. Indeed, the self-contradictory nature of 
some parts of the logical positivist philosophy is sufficiently 
glaring to render such criticisms inevitable. To meet them, 
some logical positivists have re-interpreted the verification 
principle in such a way that the criterion of meaning in terms 
of verifiability shrinks into a proposal or recommendation that 
philosophers should enunciate only those propositions which are 
capable of being empirically verified. Thus, in the Introduction 
to the revised edition of Language , Truth and Logic , Ayer so 
reduces the claims of the verification principle that it becomes 
no more than a definition of one proper use of the word c ‘mean¬ 
ing’ 5 , with the corollary that it is possible for metaphysical 
statements which have no meaning in the sense allowed by the 
verification principle to have meaning in some other sense. 
“Although 55 , he writes, “I should still defend the use of the 
criterion of verifiability as a methodological principle, I realize 
that for the effective elimination of metaphysics it needs to be 
supported by detailed analyses of particular metaphysical 
arguments . 55 The principle, in fact, has now become a recom¬ 
mendation that philosophers who desire to produce fruitful 
work should confine their attentions to propositions of a certain 
type, that type, namely, which interests logical positivists, and 
should ignore others. This modest re-statement of the principle 
concedes to critics of Logical Positivism most of what they would 
wish to claim . 1 Anybody can issue a proposal or make a 
recommendation, but whether the recommendation is to be 
accepted and the proposal adopted by philosophers will depend 
upon considerations which are independent of the verification 

1 In the Introduction to the revised edition of Ayer’s book, most of the dis¬ 
tinctive doctrines of Logical Positivism referred to in this and the immediately 
preceding chapters are either abandoned or so emasculated as to cease to be 
either harmful or distinctive. 


74 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

principle, and, more particularly, upon the philosophers’ 
antecedent views of the status of metaphysical propositions. If 
on other grounds philosophers find difficulty in sharing Ayer’s 
view that metaphysics is nonsense, they will not adopt the 
proposal; for the proposal is, after all, quite arbitrary, being no 
more than a reflection of the interests and a projection of the 
tastes of logical positivists. There can, it is obvious, be no 
objection to their confining their attention to these topics, if 
these are what happen to interest them. But they are not 
entitled to prescribe their predilections for others and those who 
do not share their interests or tastes will feel under no obliga¬ 
tion to adopt the proposal, but will continue to consider the 
problems that interest them , undeterred by the logical positivists’ 
refusal to take part in their discussions. (Though why logical 
positivists should persist in this refusal when, if they follow Ayer, 
they are now required to allow that metaphysical statements 
may have meaning in some one of the other senses of the word 
“meaning”, is not clear.) 

Non-Sensory Constituents of Scientific Knowledge 

I have so far confined myself (i) to citing obvious examples of 
what is prima facie non-sensory knowledge, and (ii) to showing 
that the kind of knowledge which logical positivists claim in 
respect of their own propositions, as, for example, the know¬ 
ledge which they claim to have when they know the verifica¬ 
tion principle, is included among these examples. 

I propose now to consider in some detail a particular example 
of non-sensory knowledge. The case I propose to consider is the 
non-sensory element which is necessarily involved in scientific 
knowledge. If the world consists entirely of sensory facts, then 
the only knowledge which it is possible to have is the purely 
descriptive knowledge which the sciences give. Science is a 
kind of cosmic geography; it tells us what are the sensory facts 
which constitute the empirical world, how they are arranged 
and what relations they have one to another. According to 
Logical Positivism, all knowledge which is not tautologous 
conforms, as we have seen, to this type. All genuine knowledge 
is for Logical Positivism like scientific knowledge in that it is a 
knowledge of sensory facts. 

I venture to make three points, (i) There is a difference 
between how things are and how they look. The stick in water 


LOGICAL POSITIVISM AND THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 75 

looks bent, but, we say, it is straight; the polished surface feels 
smooth, but examination through a microscope discloses that 
it is uneven; the earth’s surface may look flat but we know that 
it is curved, and so on. 

Now, when we formulate scientific laws we intend them to 
apply to the behaviour of natural objects, to natural objects, 
that is to say, not as they appear to be, but as we know them to 
be, natural objects as we know them to be being other than natural 
objects as we actually experience them. Take, for example, a 
square block of wood. I never see it as square simply because 
I cannot see all its sides at once; nor do I feel it as square. Again, 
I never see the molecules, atoms, protons and electrons of which, 
if I am a physicist, I know the block of wood to be composed. 
What, then, is the relation of the information yielded by my 
sense-experience to the order of nature that science explores 
and describes? 

The answer to this question is controversial, but prima facie 
we may say that our visual impressions are taken as clues to an 
order of events of which they supply evidence but which is other 
than they. It follows that the order of my actual experiences 
is different from the order of natural objects and events which 
science describes. 

It is, of course, true that when we say that the stick seen in 
water is straight, we correct our visual impressions by evidence 
derived from touch, and that when we say that the surface is 
uneven, we correct our tactile impressions by evidence derived 
from sight. But the inference is, once again, forced upon us 
that the natural order of events about which science gives us 
information is neither the same as the order of our visual impres¬ 
sions nor the same as the order of our tactile impressions. Both 
are clues to what is other than they, but clues of varying degrees 
of accuracy. In the first instance, the tactile, in the second, the 
visual clue is taken to be the more accurate. My conclusion is 
that the kind of knowledge that science gives is not wholly 
empirical; for it is not sense-experience alone that assures me 
that the stick is straight, the surface uneven, the earth curved 
and the block square. I know these things as the result of a 
process of reasoning which is based upon an interpretation of my 
sense-experience. 

(2) Secondly, the fact that we make the distinction between 
what seems crooked and is straight, seems two-dimensional but 


76 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

is three, seems flat but is curved, taking the contents of our 
sensory experiences as clues to something else of which these 
are an appearance, has an important bearing upon the pheno- 
menalist analysis of perception. For what the fact implies is 
not only that we take our perceptions—and I am here using the 
word “perception” in what I take to be its original and correct 
sense to denote our acts of sensing or perceiving—as relevatory 
of what is other than themselves, but that we take the immediate 
content of what they reveal to us to be a clue to something 
other than the content. We know, then, that the physical 
world is other than it seems on perception to be. But if this is 
so, no analysis of the physical world in terms purely of sense- 
contents can ever be exhaustive, since sense-contents only give 
us information about what seems to be the case. I conclude that 
the purely phenomenalist analysis of perception which Logical 
Positivism adopts fails to cover the facts. It fails in particular 
to account for the fact referred to in a previous chapter, 1 that 
when I make contact with the table, I not only receive a number 
of sense-impressions but I know that there is an object, the table, 
to cause the impressions which is other than they. It is for this 
reason that I ventured to stigmatize the purely phenomenalist 
analysis as a dogma, since it dogmatically refuses to take this 
admitted fact—that I not only have sense-impressions but 
know that there is a cause for them which is other than they— 
into account. 

(3) Thirdly, when we say that our sensory experiences are 
taken as clues to a natural order of events which is other than 
they, we are implying that they supply knowledge of that order. 
Hence, our perceptual experiences belong to two different 
kinds or orders of fact. As members of the first order, they 
figure as events in our minds which may well be linked with 
events in our bodies and brains, which are themselves causally 
dependent on the structure and stimulation of our sense-organs. 
In this context the events which are my experiences are 
members of the natural order of events which science studies. 
In so far as they are events in a mind, the science which 
is relevant to their study is psychology; in so far as they are 
linked with events in my brain and body, they are causally 
dependent upon the natural order of events which falls within 
the scope of physiology, while the events which stimulate our 
1 See ch. II, pp. 32, 33. 


LOGICAL POSITIVISM AND THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 77 

sense-organs belong to the natural order of events studied by 
physics. 

But these events which are my experiences are also a know¬ 
ledge of other events, these other events being those which science 
studies and the knowledge of them which my experiences supply 
being the kind of knowledge of which science is constituted. 

If the events in our own minds were not also a knowledge of 
events other than themselves, there would be no science. Yet 
this fact, the fact, namely, that the events in our own minds 
are also a knowledge of other facts is not itself a scientific fact, 
since it is not accessible to observation by any sense-organ and 
no science is relevant to its study. 

Thus scientific knowledge entails the existence of one fact 
which is not an empirical fact, the fact, namely, that the events 
in our minds are also a knowledge of empirical facts. 

Now, this twofold character of the events in our minds, which 
are at the same time events belonging to the natural order and 
also a knowing of other events, escapes the notice of scientists 
whose attention is concentrated upon the external world. In 
so far as they concern themselves with events in minds, they 
think of them as mental processes, think of them; that is to say, 
as occurrences which belong solely to the natural order of 
events. But this fact to which I have drawn attention, the fact 
that an event in the natural order is also at the same time a 
knowledge of other events, should not escape the attention of 
philosophers; nor, indeed, has it done so in the past, as the 
voluminous writings on the nature of knowledge, which go by 
the name of epistemology, bear witness. As Plato pointed out 
in the Theaetetus , v/hile my eye is in a place and, therefore, 
accessible to scientific study, and the table is in a place and, 
therefore, also accessible to scientific study, the awareness of 
the table which follows upon the stimulation of my optical 
nerve is not in any place. Therefore, it is not describable by 
science. Yet the awareness is certainly a fact, a fact which, 
incidentally, is the pre-supposition of our knowing any scientific 
fact. 

When the dimensions of what is are arbitrarily limited to the 
sensory sphere, this fact comes to be overlooked, precisely 
because a theory of knowledge which, like that of Logical 
Positivism, countenances only scientific knowledge, that is to 
say, knowledge of sensory facts, can make no provision for it. 


y8 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

When confronted with an experience which is at once a fact 
belonging to the natural order of events and also a knowing of 
other facts, Logical Positivism takes account of it only in the 
first of its two capacities and overlooks its second. It seems to 
me that this failure to realize the significance of the knowing 
of one event by another, and so to allow for the fact that the 
knowledge of sensory facts is not itself a sensory fact, invalidates 
all purely empirical theories of knowledge. It also invalidates 
the proposition that all knowledge is of the kind exemplified 
by the sciences. 


CHAPTER V 


LOGICAL CONSTRUCTIONS 
Definition and Statement 

In the previous chapter I considered the question what, for 
Logical Positivism, it means to know; I turn now to the question 
what, for Logical Positivism, it means to be. The two enquiries 
are, indeed, continuous and the account of logical positivist 
epistemology given in the preceding chapter leads naturally to 
an account of logical positivist ontology. 

With the possible exception of sense-contents 1 to be, for 
Logical Positivism, means to be a logical construction. I have 
already quoted a brief statement of Ayer’s account of logical 
constructions. 2 For purposes of easy reference I give it in full 
here: 

“ ... When we speak of certain objects, b, c, d ... as being 
elements of an object e, and of e as being constituted by 
b, c, d . . . we are not saying that they form part of e, in the 
sense in which my arm is a part of my body, or a particular 
set of books on my shelf is part of my collection of books. 
What we are saying is that all the sentences in which the 
symbol e occurs can be translated into sentences which do not 
contain e itself, or any symbol which is synonymous with e, 
but do contain symbols b, c, d. . . . In such a case we say 
that e is a logical construction out of b, c, d. . . . And, in 
general, we may explain the nature of logical constructions 
by saying that the introduction of symbols which denote 
logical constructions is a device which enables us to state 
complicated propositions about the elements of these con¬ 
structions in a relatively simple form.” 

(i) Inaccuracies of Statement 

The definition is, I think, carelessly worded. What Ayer 
implies is that the symbol “e” is a logical construction out of 

1 1 say, “possible” having regard to the doubts raised in the discussion in ch. Ill, 
pp. 46-50. 

2 See ch. Ill, p. 47. 


79 


80 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

symbols “b, c and d”. What, I think, he means is that object “e” 
is a logical construction out of objects “b, c and d”, where the 
objects “b, c and d”, which he refers to as elements of “e”, are 
sense-contents. His account is also misleading in another way. 
He goes on to suggest that such an “object” as “the average 
Englishman”, is a logical construction out of Tom, Dick and 
Harry; but these names do not, in fact, appear as elements in 
the translation of sentences in which the symbol “the average 
Englishman” occurs. What does appear as an element in such 
sentences is the symbol “Englishmen”. 

These, however, are minor inaccuracies, although the first 
springs from a confusion between symbol and things symbolized 
which runs, as I think, through much of logical positivist 
thought. 

(2) What is Gained by the Translation? 

A question which immediately presents itself is, why should 
this translation of statements about the table into statements 
about sense-contents be made? As a common-sense man as, 
that is to say, a man who is not philosophizing, I know the table 
very well and believe myself to be in a position to make state¬ 
ments about it. What is more, I think that I can make these state¬ 
ments because I believe myself to be directly acquainted with 
the table’s characteristics; with, for example, the fact that it is 
square, brown and hard. It is, of course, true that I have sense- 
experiences of the table but I don’t know very much about them. 
Certainly I do not know them with the same certainty and 
exactitude as I know the table and I have, therefore, great 
difficulty in describing them. If I try, I find that I must have 
recourse to such expressions as a feeling of pressure when I 
touch the table, a visual sensation of brownness which grows 
gradually lighter in shade as my eye travels towards what I take 
to be the edges of the table when I look at it, a sensation of a 
sharp rapping sound when I hit it with my knuckles, and so on. 
These sense-experiences of mine are vague and indefinite. 
Their most noticeable characteristic is perhaps their trans¬ 
parency; they are, as it were, the windows through which my 
awareness becomes focused on the table. Moreover, whatever 
characteristics I find myself able to ascribe to them are, I should 
say—and I am still voicing what I take to be the assumptions of 
common sense—palpably bestowed upon them by the table; my 


LOGICAL CONSTRUCTIONS 


8l 


visual sensation is of brownness because the table is brown; I 
have a feeling of pressure because the table is hard, and so on. 
Hence, to translate the table which is obviously given and 
directly known into terms of sense-contents which are obscure, 
hard to introspect and, therefore, comparatively unknown, 
seems to me to be an act of gratuitous obscurantism. 

What, then, is the purpose of the translation? Is it, for 
example, supposed that when symbols that stand for things are 
translated into symbols that stand for actual or possible sense- 
contents, we are effecting a translation from the less known and 
the less verifiable, to the more? Not only does introspection 
suggest the contrary to be the case, but, as I have already 
pointed out, 1 a well-known theory of perception suggests that 
we are in sense-perception directly aware not of sense-contents, 
but of data which are not parts of our experience though the 
act of apprehending them is. I fail, then, to see what advantage 
is secured by the translation of statements about the table into 
statements about sense-contents or to understand what the 
purpose of the translation may be. 

(3) The Difficulty about Words 

The theory of logical constructions raises a difficulty to be 
developed in the next chapters in regard to the status of words. 
It is because things are proclaimed to be logical construc¬ 
tions, that metaphysical propositions, as for example, that 
“God is Love”, 2 or “the universe is a unified whole”, or “the 
real is rational”, are regarded as being merely verbal. They 
tell us, that is to say, about the ways in which words are used. 
Thus, Ayer says that the question “ ‘What is a universal?’ is not, 
as it has traditionally been regarded, a question about the 
character of certain real objects, but a request for a definition 
of a certain term. Philosophy, as it is written, is full of questions 
like this, which seem to be factual but are not.” This mode of 
treatment is extended from metaphysical to physical objects. 
“To ask what is the nature of a material object is to ask for a 
definition of‘material object’, and this... is to ask how proposi¬ 
tions about material objects are to be translated into proposi¬ 
tions about sense-contents.” The conclusion is that descriptive 
statements are not about truths or facts or even about material 
objects, as they purport to be and as those who make them 
1 See ch. II, pp. 35, 36. 2 See ch. VI, pp. 98-100. 


82 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

intend them to be; they are about words and about the way in 
which words are used. When the philosopher thinks he is 
enquiring into the nature of things and their relations, whether 
non-sensory and metaphysical or sensory and material, he is 
deceiving himself. What he is doing is defining words:“ We may 
speak loosely of him as analysing facts, or notions, or even 
things. But we must make it clear that these are simply ways 
of saying that he is concerned with the definition of the corre¬ 
sponding words.” 

The Status of Words 

Now, Ayer clearly means this to be a factual assertion in the 
sense in which, as he tells us, “the assertion that tables were 
fictitious objects would be a factual assertion, albeit a false one”. 
It is a factual assertion about words and the definitions of 
words. What, then, are words? Prima facie words are things. 
They are assemblages of letters, marks on paper, sounds. Now 
things are logical constructions. Therefore, to ask “what is a 
word?” is not to ask “a question about the character of certain 
real objects” but to make “a request for a definition of a certain 
term”. More precisely, to ask the question, “what is the nature 
of a word, (X)?” is to be “concerned with the definition of the 
corresponding words”, which words, I propose, to indicate by 
the symbols X l5 X 2 . 

To complete our summary of Ayer’s account of the things 
which are words, we must add that words are also symbols and 
symbols are definable in terms of sense-contents. Thus, “sen¬ 
tences which contain the symbol ‘table’ or the corresponding 
symbol in any language which has the same structure as English, 
can all be translated into sentences of the same language which 
do not contain that symbol, nor any of its synonyms but do 
contain certain symbols which stand for sense-contents.” Hence, 
Ayer continues, “to say anything about a table is always to say 
something about sense-contents”. Hence, to say something 
about a word is to say something about sense-contents. 

I cannot pretend that I have found my way successfully 
through this tangle of definitions. 

I think, however, that Ayer’s various statements may be not 
unfairly summarized in the following propositions: 

(i) Things are logical constructions out of words which 
symbolize sense-contents. 


LOGICAL CONSTRUCTIONS 83 

(2) Words, being things, are also logical constructions out of 
words which symbolize sense-contents. 

(3) To ask, “what is a thing?” is to make “a request for a 
definition of a certain term” and to analyse a thing is to be 
“concerned with the definition of the corresponding words”. 

(4) Hence, to ask, “What is a word?” is to make “a request 
for a definition of a certain term” and to analyse a word is to 
be “concerned with the definition of the corresponding words”. 

(5) On Ayer’s view, the answer to the question, “What is the 
nature of a thing?” takes the form of a definition. Hence, the 
statement that a thing is a “so and so” is an analytical proposi¬ 
tion, so that the answer to the question, “what is the nature of a 
thing?”, “simply records our determination to use words in a 
certain fashion”. 

Now let us suppose that I ask, “what is a table?” According 
to (3), I am asking for a definition of a certain term, that term, 
namely, which is “the corresponding word”, “table”. It turns out, 
then, that to ask something about a thing, table, when I ask, 
“what is a table?”, is to ask something about the word, “table”. 

What, then, I repeat, is the word, “table”? I will, first, give 
my own answer. Words are universal which are exemplified by 
particular instances. Thus, if I write the word, “table”, in pencil, 
I make black marks on a white background. If I write it in ink, 
or print it, I am still making black marks on a white back¬ 
ground. The three sets of marks are numerically distinct and 
may, in fact, look different. Nevertheless, they all have some¬ 
thing in common, the something in question being the fact that 
they are instances of, or exemplify, the universal which is the 
written word, table. Similarly, every time the word “table” is 
uttered , there occurs a different particular instance of the uni¬ 
versal which is the spoken word, table, of which each uttered 
word is a particular instance. The universal, which is ’ the 
written word, table, and the universal which is the spoken word, 
table, are themselves particular instances of the universal 
which is the word, table. 

Hence, if I ask the question, “what is the word, table?” I may 
be referring either to the universal which is the word, table, or 
to one of the particulars. 

Logical positivists dismiss universals as metaphysical entities, 
analysing them into classes of particulars which are similar to 
a given particular. The question which I am asking when I 


84 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

ask, “what is the word, table?” must, then, presumably, for 
logical positivists, be a question about one of the particulars of 
the word, table. Now such a particular is, it is obvious, a thing. 
If written, it occupies a position in space; it can also be seen, 
since the black marks of which it consists stimulate my sense- 
organs and provide me with visual sense-contents. Again, it 
can be heard, when, as a result of being spoken, it sets going 
waves in the atmosphere which stimulate my aural sense-organs. 

Since it is a thing, to ask “what is the nature of the word, 
table?” which word I have indicated by the symbol X, is to 
ask for a definition of a certain term or, more precisely, to be 
“concerned with the definition of the corresponding words”. 
What, then, is the term and what are “the corresponding 
words”? Presumably, they are either the words which corre¬ 
spond to the word, “table”, words which I have indicated by the 
symbols X x and X 2 or they are some other “corresponding 
words”. What these other corresponding words may be, I do 
not know, but I will call them Y and Z. 

The Infinite Regress Again 

The conclusion is that to ask “what is the word, X?” is to get 
an answer in terms of other words, either X x and X 2 , or Y 
and Z. 

Similarly, to ask, “what are the words X x and X 2 ?” is to 
obtain an answer in terms of X 3 and X 4 , or of P and Q,. 

The process, it is obvious, can continue indefinitely, so that 
when we ask the question, “what is a word?”, an infinite regress 
is involved in the answer. Since the definition of the nature of 
things is in terms of words, an infinite regress is involved when¬ 
ever we ask, “what is a thing?” 

Now whatever may be the correct answer to the question, 
“what is a table?” I feel reasonably convinced that it is not an 
answer which takes the form of giving a verbal definition, which 
has meaning only in terms of another verbal definition, and so 
on indefinitely, the presumption being that the question, “what 
is a thing?” can never be answered. 

But Ayer suggests another answer to the question, “what is the 
word, table?” where the word, table, is a particular thing. It is 
that it is a logical construction out of words which symbolize 
sense-contents. 1 In other words, if to say “this is a table” is (to 

1 See (2), p. 83. 


LOGICAL CONSTRUCTIONS 


85 

put it shortly) to say that, if I make certain movements certain 
sense-contents will occur, to say, “this is the word, table”, is to 
say (I am again putting it shortly) that if I make or somebody 
else makes certain movements with his fingers, certain sense- 
contents will occur, and that if I make or somebody else makes 
certain movements in his larynx and with his tongue, certain 
other sense-contents will occur. Hence, to ask, “what is the 
word, table?” is to obtain an answer in terms of sense-contents. 

(As I have already pointed out 1 a similar answer must be 
given to the question, “what is a sense-content?” so that another 
infinite regress lurks here.) 

Since to ask, “what is a table?” is to ask for a definition of “the 
corresponding words”, we get the curious result that the answer 
to the question “what is a table?” will take the form of a state¬ 
ment to the effect that certain sense-contents are occurring, or 
might occur, not, as one would suppose, those sense-contents which 
would be normally said to verify the statement , “this is a table”, as 
for example, sense-contents which are hard, square and black, 
but those sense-contents which would normally be said to verify the 
statement “this is the word, table”, these being the sense-contents 
appropriate to or connected with black marks on a white back¬ 
ground and noises in larynxes. 

Now, this anomalous result arises, I suggest, from the fact 
that words are not treated by logical positivists as other 
“things” are treated, but are accorded privileged treatment. 
Words are not treated as logical constructions but as real 
things, so that, while the thing, table, is regarded as being only 
a symbol which we require to translate into other symbols 
which stand for sense-contents, no such translation is felt to be 
necessary in respect of the word, “table”. Logical positivists, as 
it seems to me, overlook the fact that words, too, are empirical 
phenomena, and that, when we know what words occur in a 
sentence, what we are knowing is a non-verbal fact about 
things. If it be admitted that we know at least one non-verbal 
fact, that is to say, one fact about the world which is neither 
translatable into sentences about the knower’s sense-contents 
nor reducible to logical constructions, it seems unnecessary to 
elaborate ingenious and dubious theories to explain away our 
apparent knowledge of physical things such as tables and chairs 
which certainly appears to be a knowledge of non-verbal facts, 
1 See ch. Ill, pp. 46-50. 


86 


A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

a knowledge, therefore, of the nature of what is, as being merely 
verbal. If our knowledge of words is treated as if it were not 
merely verbal, why should it not also be possible for our 
knowledge of other facts, to be not merely verbal? For it 
would, indeed, be odd if the analysis accorded to a particular 
class of things, namely, words, was totally different from that 
accorded to things belonging to all other classes. But such a 
conclusion would invalidate both the view that metaphysics 
is nonsense and the view that all physical things are logical 
constructions. 





CHAPTER VI 


GENERAL PRINCIPLES AND THEORY OF 
TRUTH 


Statement of View 

The view that there are certain first principles which are 
intuitively perceived to be true, and that by reasoning deduc¬ 
tively from these principles it should in theory be possible to 
reach certain truths about the nature of reality is repudiated 
by Logical Positivism. General principles, to be fruitful, must, 
Ayer declares, be obtained inductively. Many philosophers, he 
points out, have accepted as first principles a set of a priori 
truths; but these, as we have seen, are, on Ayer’s view, tauto¬ 
logies and from them only further tautologies can be deduced. 
First principles and general principles are, then, to be obtained 
inductively. The following questions suggest themselves. 

COMMENTS 

(i ) By What Methods is Ayer's General Principle Reached? 

This declaration is itself a declaration of first principle. It 
is a premise from which many conclusions of importance to 
Logical Positivism follow. How, then, is it obtained? There 
seem to be two alternatives: (a) that it is obtained by induc¬ 
tion; ( b ) that it is regarded as a “self-evident” principle. As to 
(a), it is difficult to see what kind of inductive process could be 
relevant to the establishment of such a principle; none at any 
rate is offered. As to ( b ), the principle is by no means self- 
evident to all or even most philosophers. 

The difficulty raised by this principle is similar to that which 
we have already encountered in connexion with the verifica¬ 
tion principle. How, I asked in Chapter IV, is the verification 
principle known? It is not established empirically—it is not, 
that is to say, the evidence of any one of our senses that assures 
us that the meaning of a principle is the mode of its verification, 
nor, I argued, was it a tautology. My conclusion was that 
the principle of verification did not conform to the general 

87 


88 


A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

requirements laid down by Ayer for the establishment of 
meaningful propositions. A similar verdict must, I think, be 
passed upon the principle that general principles must be 
obtained inductively. 

Similarly, with regard to Ayer’s treatment of the principle of 
implication, which he states as follows: “If p implies q , and p 
is true, q is true”, a principle which he describes as a tautology. 
Is, then, the principle that the principle of implication is a 
tautology inductively arrived at? I cannot see that it is; it is 
simply announced. Indeed, the structure of Logical Positivism 
is studded with principles which may be termed first principles, 
in the sense that all manner of consequences are deduced from 
them, which are themselves simply announced. Yet we are 
told that all first principles must be obtained inductively with 
the exception of those which are tautologous, from which only 
other tautologies follow. 

(2) Logical Positivism and Induction 

From first principles, however obtained, logical positivists 
proceed by inductive reasoning to reach certain conclusions. 

The question may be asked, what justification have they for 
proceeding by induction, unless they know that the inductive 
principle is true. And since it is not by induction that the truth 
of the principle is established, what right have they to assume 
it to be true? These are familiar difficulties and Ayer, who is, 
of course, well aware of them, says: “There is no possible way 
of solving the problem of induction, as it is ordinarily con¬ 
ceived.” This is not to say that Ayer conceives the problem 
differently; he leaves it unsolved, contenting himself with 
pointing out that induction is continually used in science and 
that “what justifies scientific procedure, to the extent to which 
it is capable of being justified, is the success of the predictions 
to which it gives rise”. In other words, provided that “the 
necessary condition of self-consistency” is satisfied, success in 
practice, success, that is to say, in enabling us to anticipate our 
experiences, is all that we are entitled to demand of the pro¬ 
positions which make up the so-called truths of science. As for 
the philosophical problem touching our grounds for relying on 
the process of inductive inference by means of which the con¬ 
clusions of science are reached, no more is said about it. Per¬ 
haps it is dismissed as a pseudo-problem, or as meaningless. 


GENERAL PRINCIPLES AND THEORY OF TRUTH 89 

This is fair enough—we none of us know how to solve the 
problem of induction—provided that one does not go on to 
say that first principles, including, therefore, the principle of 
induction, must be reached inductively; provided also that one 
does not imply, as Ayer does, that it is induction and only 
induction that justifies us in believing in material things. 

Induction and Material Things 

Ayer’s various statements in regard to the existence of 
material things are, as we have seen, confusing. 1 Sometimes 
they are treated as logical constructions; sometimes they are 
analysed into sets of sense-contents—“we know” says Ayer, 
“that it must be possible to define material things in terms of 
sense-contents”. There are, however, other passages in which 
Ayer seems to imply that they do, indeed, exist in the sense in 
which in ordinary life we suppose them to exist. I have, for 
example, quoted on a previous page 2 a passage in which he 
rebukes writers on perception who “assume that, unless one 
can give a satisfactory analysis of perceptual situations, one is 
not entitled to believe in the existence of material things”. He 
goes on to assert that “what gives one the right to believe in the 
existence of a certain material thing is simply the fact that one 
has certain sensations”. Similarly with events which we are not 
actually observing; their occurence may, he says, be inferred 
by the help of general principles obtained inductively, among 
which, presumably, must be included the principle of induction 
itself. 

But how can we know inductively that we are entitled to 
infer the existence of material things which are not and never 
can be experienced from the occurrence of sense-contents which 
are experienced? And how can we know inductively that we 
can infer events which are unobserved from sense-contents 
which, presumably, are observed? It is not merely that the 
material things are unexperienced, the events unobserved; 
more serious is the fact that material things are totally unlike 
anything which on Ayer’s view ever has been or can be ex¬ 
perienced, since they are material, and unobserved events are 
totally unlike any events such as sense-contents that are or can 
be observed; or, rather, since they are unobserved, we have not 
the faintest notion what they are like. My questions are, then, 

1 See the discussion in ch. II, pp. 36-38. 2 See ch. II, p. 37. 


gO A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

what sort of general principle is it that entitles us to postulate 
the existence of these unexperienced material objects and un¬ 
observed events, by what method is it obtained and how is it 
known? 

(3) Analytic Tautologies 

My third comment on Ayer’s treatment of general principles 
relates more particularly to those general principles which are a 
priori and, therefore, on his view, both analytic and tautologous. 

Ayer’s doctrine in regard to these is that, in so far as they can 
be said to be about anything, they are about the use of language. 
They “record our determination to use words in a certain 
fashion”. Now, it is, of course, the case that some definitions in 
logic and mathematics are preferred to others. Indeed, cases 
have occurred in which one definition has been discarded and 
another substituted precisely because the second was thought 
to be better than the first. What does “better” mean? More 
“useful”, says Ayer, and more “fruitful”. 

What do “useful” and “fruitful” mean? The answer is, 
more liable to draw our attention to truths: “A well chosen 
definition will call our attention to analytic truths which would 
otherwise have escaped us.” What are these “truths”? Are they 
further tautologies? Presumably they must be, since they are 
qualified by the word, “analytic”. For my part, I find it diffi¬ 
cult to ascribe meaning to the conception of a fruitful “tauto¬ 
logy” or to see how one tautology can be more fruitful than 
another, especially as we are told that from a tautology 
nothing but other tautologies can be validly deduced. 1 

I shall proceed in a moment to consider Ayer’s treatment of 
truth, and to point out that he eschews the word “truth”, 
stigmatizing it as meaningless, and substitutes the word 
“validity”, whenever he can. However truth will “out” as it 
has done here, the word “truth” slipping out, inadvertently, 
as it were, because, try as he may, Ayer cannot entirely 
eliminate the concept for which it stands. For what is the 
position which he is asking us to accept? 

(i) All logical and mathematical propositions are (a) analytic, 
( b ) tautologous and (c) verbal, in the sense that they “merely 
record our determination to use words in a certain fashion”. 

1 One is tempted to wonder whether all tautological principles should not, on 
Ayer’s premises, be accounted equally “fruitful” in that from any one of them all 
other tautologies could in theory be validly deduced? 


GENERAL PRINCIPLES AND THEORY OF TRUTH 91 

(ii) Some logical and mathematical definitions are to be 
preferred to others. 

(iii) They are preferable, because, more fruitful, that is, they 
call our attention to “analytic truths which would otherwise 
have escaped us”. 

(iv) Analytic truths according to (i) are (a) tautologous, and 
(. b ) linguistic, that is, they “record our determination to use 
words in a certain fashion”. 

(v) Hence, in saying that some definitions are better than 
others, what we must mean is that when we are enunciating 
tautologies, some of them draw our attention to our deter¬ 
mination to use words in a certain fashion more efficiently than 
others do. 

I have two comments, (i) Why should we use words in one 
fashion rather than in another, if the preferred fashion turns 
out to be only a way of drawing attention to our determination 
to use words in one way rather than in another? (2) A well 
chosen definition is only a tautology and analytic truths, even 
those which might “otherwise have escaped us”, are only 
tautologies. From tautologies, Ayer has already told us, nothing 
can be inferred but other tautologies. Why, then, one wonders, 
should some tautologies be preferred to others? 

An adequate answer to these questions would, I suggest, 
require us to give to the phrase “analytic truths” some mean¬ 
ing other than a purely linguistic one. But such a meaning 
would entail the use of the word “truth” in its old-fashioned 
sense of correspondence with fact, a “useful” or “fruitful” 
definition being one which corresponds to the nature of the 
things defined more closely than one which has been found by 
experience to be “useless” or “fruitless”. 

This brings me to Ayer’s treatment of truth. 

Ayer’s Account of Truth 

Ayer begins by dismissing the notion of truth, in the sense in 
which the word is used when questions are asked of the type, 
“what is truth?” or “what is the meaning of truth?” To ask, 
“what is truth” is, he says, to ask for “a translation of the 
sentence ‘(the proposition) f> is true’ ”. 

In sentences of this kind, however, the phrase, “is true”, is, 
he points out, superfluous. Thus, to say that the proposition, 
“ ‘Queen Anne is dead’ is true”, is merely to say that “Queen 


92 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

Anne is dead”. Hence, “the terms ‘true 5 and ‘false’ connote 
nothing, but function in the sentence simply as marks of 
assertion and denial. And in that case there can be no sense in 
asking us to analyse the concept of‘truth’.” 

Instead, then, of vainly discussing the nature of “truth” and 
the meaning of “true”, we are asked to consider how empirical 
propositions are validated. Our question, in Ayer’s words, 
becomes, “What is the criterion by which we test the validity 
of an empirical proposition?” It is to this question that all the 
theories and speculations about the nature of truth which have 
for so long occupied the attention of philosophers fine themselves 
down. To be able to answer it is, Ayer intimates, to be in a 
position to dispose finally of the philosophical problem of 
truth. Now, Ayer gives a quite definite answer to this question. 
He says that “We test the validity of an empirical hypothesis 
by seeing whether it actually fulfils the function which it is 
designed to fulfil. And we have seen that the function of an 
empirical hypothesis is to enable us to anticipate experience.” 
To anticipate experience means to enable us to predict what 
sensations or sense-contents we shall have in a particular 
situation. Empirical propositions are, then, of the nature of 
hypotheses which “are designed to enable us to anticipate the 
course of our sensations”. 

Now, such propositions have, he holds, only probability 
value. Further observations by which their validity is tested, 
may and, indeed, will, if successful, increase our confidence in 
them, but they never establish them beyond the possibility of 
doubt. 

Hence, in saying, “that an observation increases the prob¬ 
ability of a proposition”, what we mean is “that it increases 
our confidence in the proposition, as measured by our willing¬ 
ness to rely on it in practice as a forecast of our sensations”. 

Putting this shortly, when we say that a proposition is true, 
what we mean is that it has enabled us in the past to predict 
our sensations with success, and that we rely upon it to enable 
us successfully to predict our sensations in the future. 

(i) Comments on the Theory 

I venture, first, to raise a verbal point. When embarking on 
an analysis of the word, “truth”, Ayer substitutes the word, 
“validity”. For the question, what is meant by saying that 


GENERAL PRINCIPLES AND THEORY OF TRUTH 93 

( f> is true’? he substitutes the question, by what criterion is 
l> validated? 

What, then, is the purpose of the substitution of the words 
“validity”, “valid” and “validated” for the words “truth”, 
“true” and “shown to be true”? Further, what is the ground 
for the substitution? Are the two sets of words synonymous, or 
is there some subtle difference of meaning between, how is /> 
known to be true? and how is /> validated? which causes the 
latter expression to be preferred? If so, what is the difference? 
We are not told. 

(2) Some Necessary Distinctions (a) 

One would have thought prima facie that the procedure 
which I adopt for determining whether a proposition is true 
must be different from the meaning which I have in mind when 
I say that it is true. Thus, if I say that there are a hundred 
people in the room, what I mean to assert is the co-existence of a 
number of physical facts, or, more precisely, of a pattern of 
physical facts, standing in a certain relation to each other. It is 
to this pattern of facts that my statement purports to refer and it 
is with them that, if it is true, I believe it to correspond. The 
fact that if Ayer is right, I ought not to mean anything of the 
kind, does not alter the fact that it is this precisely that I do 
mean. The procedure I adopt for finding out whether my state¬ 
ment is true is to go through the room counting the number of 
people in order to find out how many there are. But to recog¬ 
nize that this is the method by which Ifind out whether my statement 
is true does not in the least entail that this is what I mean when I 
say that it is true . 

Moreover, Ayer, as we have seen, gives, in the case of analytic 
propositions an account of what it means to say that they 
are true which is notably different from his account of the 
meaning of the truth of empirical propositions. To say that 
twenty plus thirty equals fifty means, for him, no more than 
that we have decided to use words in a certain fashion. But to 
say, ‘here are two boxes of apples, there are twenty apples in 
the one box and thirty in the other; therefore, there are fifty in 
all’ is to make a statement of empirical fact; it is, in fact, to 
say something about the world. Now, in the case of this latter 
statement, the meaning is not, according to Ayer, that I have 
decided to use words in a certain fashion, but is the procedure 


94 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

which I adopt for testing its validity, is, that is to say, proceed¬ 
ing on the assumption that the statement, ‘there are twenty 
apples in the one box and thirty in the other’, is true, anticipat¬ 
ing future experience by entertaining an expectation as to the 
occurrence of certain sense-contents which are appropriate on 
this assumption, and then finding that the sense-contents 
expected do, in fact, occur. For my part, I find it difficult to 
believe that the meaning of the two statements I have cited 
should be so totally different, difficult, that is to say, to believe 
that, when I say that thirty and twenty make fifty, I am making 
a statement about my determination to use language in a 
certain way, and that when I say that the thirty apples in this box 
and the twenty in that make fifty in all, I am making a state¬ 
ment about certain sensations that I expect to obtain as a result 
of making certain movements with my hands and eyes. It is 
certainly not apparent to me that the meaning of my two state¬ 
ments is so completely different. 

Ayer seems to overlook the consideration which lies at the 
basis of Kant’s epistemology, that many empirical propositions 
entail either explicitly or implicitly the intrusion of mathe¬ 
matical concepts, for example, in measuring and counting, and 
that the rules of logic and mathematics are, therefore, applic¬ 
able to the world of physical things which is empirically 
observed. This consideration seems to point to the fact that 
logic, mathematics and the empirical sciences all refer to a 
common world which transcends the province of each. Logical 
Positivism, so far as I can see, is forced either to deny any such 
common world transcending the provinces of the special 
sciences, or to deny that, if it exists we can make meaningful 
statement about it. For it, there is only the world of science. 
But if Kant is right—and I think that he is—our ability to 
make meaningful statements about the world of science implies 
the existence of a world which transcends that of science, a 
world which contains laws, general principles and numbers and 
to which logic and mathematics belong. Admittedly, the account 
which should be given of this common world is open to doubt, 
but Logical Positivism, by so sharply distinguishing between 
the meaning of truth in its application to analytic and em¬ 
pirical statements respectively, does, by implication, deny it. 
For my part, I should maintain that there is no knowledge of 
matters of empirical fact that does not entail the occurrence of 


GENERAL PRINCIPLES AND THEORY OF TRUTH 95 

mental activities and the recognition of relations which trans¬ 
cend empirical fact. 1 

(3) Some Necessary Distinctions ( b) 

So far I have sought to distinguish between the meaning of 
truth and the procedure which we adopt for finding out 
whether a particular statement is true. But a further distinction 
should, as it seems to me, be drawn between what we mean 
when we say that a belief is true and what causes us to think it 
true. The logical positivist definition of the meaning of “true” 
—or perhaps I should say “valid”—in its application to 
empirical propositions, namely, the property of enabling us to 
anticipate future experience, springs from an ambiguity in the 
use of the word “means”. In one of his earlier philosophical 
phases, Bertrand Russell was at pains to distinguish between 
two relevant senses of the word “means”. We can, he pointed 
out, say either (i) that “cloud means rain”, or (ii) that “pluie 
means rain”. Now the sense in which “cloud means rain” is 
different from that in which “pluie means rain”. We say that a 
“cloud means rain” because it possesses the causal properties 
and characteristics of being liable to produce rain; we say that 
“pluie means rain” because the words “pluie” and “ rain ”, both 
of which are symbols for communicating what is in our minds, 
happen to be symbols for communicating the same thought in 
the minds of two different people. Now, the sense normally 
given to the word “means” is this latter sense, and the question, 
“what is the meaning of truth?” can, therefore, be paraphrased, 
“what is it that we have in our minds when we say that a 
belief is true?” 

Now let us consider the logical positivist definition of truth 
in the light of these two possible meanings of “means”. 

Logical positivists begin by enquiring what it is that causes 
us to believe a proposition to be true. Their answer is that we 
rely upon or have confidence in a hypothesis which enables us 
to anticipate future experience; in other words, it is the fact 
that they have been found over a considerable period to 
enable us successfully to anticipate future experience which 
leads us to rely upon propositions and so (in common-sense 
language) to regard them as true. 

Now, it is probably the case that, so far as empirical matters 
1 See ch. IV, pp. 74-78, for a development of this view. 


96 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

of fact are concerned, a proposition which enables us success¬ 
fully to anticipate future experience is a proposition which we 
tend to affirm to be true. It is probably also the case that the 
fact that belief in a particular proposition has in the past 
enabled us to anticipate future experiences causes us to affirm 
the proposition to be true. These, however, are psychological 
considerations. They are the sort of considerations which one 
might reasonably adduce in answer to the question, what is it 
that causes a human mind to affirm a belief to be true. 

Now, as I have pointed out, there is a sense in which, if A 
causes B we may affirm that A means B, and in this sense we 
may say of a consideration that causes us to affirm a proposi¬ 
tion to be true that that consideration is what the proposition 
means. But having noticed that there is a sense in which if A 
causes B we may affirm that A means B—the first sense of 
the word, “means”, distinguished above—logical positivists 
proceed to apply this sense of the word “means” to the definition 
of the meaning of truth, and proceeds to deduce from the 
proposition, “the property of enabling us to anticipate future 
experience causes us to think the proposition which possesses 
the property true”, the further proposition “enabling us to 
anticipate future experience is what truth means”. 

Having established this conclusion, logical positivists appear 
to think that they have satisfactorily “defined” the meaning of 
truth. But they have “defined” it only in terms of the first 
sense of the word, “means”, referred to above, the sense, that 
is to say, in which a cloud “means” rain, because a cloud causes 
rain. But this, as I have pointed out, is not the sense which we 
commonly have in mind when we use the word “means” and, 
in particular, it is not the sense which we have in mind when we 
ask, “what is the meaning of truth?” If, then, it is conceded 
that there is a distinction between (a) what we have in mind 
when we say that a belief is true, and ( b ) what causes us to say 
that a belief is true, it would seem to follow that the logical 
positivist definition of the meaning of truth, which may con¬ 
ceivably be a correct account of ( b ), is not the correct interpre¬ 
tation of (a). 

(4) Correspondence with Fact 

Ayer’s account of truth in the case of empirical propositions 
may be shortly formulated as follows: an empirical proposition 


GENERAL PRINCIPLES AND THEORY OF TRUTH 97 

is a hypothesis which we frame in order to perform a certain 
function. This function is to enable us to anticipate future 
sense-experiences, and when we say that a proposition is true, 
what we mean is that it does, in fact, enable us to predict our 
experiences, being progressively validated as its success in this 
respect continues. 

Now, the question may be asked, why do some hypotheses 
enable us to forecast the course of future sensations with sub¬ 
stantial accuracy, while others do not? Is the fact that one 
hypothesis does so, while others do not, a purely arbitrary fact? 
If, for example, I am told that there are a hundred people in 
the room by somebody whom I think to be trustworthy and 
whose word I believe, and proceed subsequently to count in 
order to make quite sure that he is right, my initial confidence 
in his statement that there are a hundred people in the room 
does, no doubt, enable me successfully to forecast my future 
sensations when I come to count them, whereas belief in the 
propositions that there are ninety-nine or one hundred and one, 
would enable me to anticipate my sensations less successfully. 
If I believed that there were a thousand, my future sensations 
when I started to verify my belief by the process of counting 
would, no doubt, surprise me considerably. But the fact that of 
all the propositions which I could have enunciated, one and 
one only enables me to predict my future experiences, while 
none of the others would have been successful in this respect, 
cannot surely be quite arbitrary. There must be some reason 
for it. And what can the reason be except that one of the pro¬ 
positions correctly states or corresponds to a fact which is what it 
is independently of the proposition, while none of the others do 
so? And what can the fact be, except that there are, indeed, a 
hundred people in the room? Just as, in the case of logical and 
mathematical propositions, there must be some reason why 
some are preferred to, because they are more fruitful than, 
others, and just as the only plausible reason why this should be 
so, is, as I suggested, that those which are more fruitful are true 
in the old-fashioned sense of corresponding with fact, 1 so with 
regard to empirical propositions, the fact that some are more 
reliable forecasters of experience than others is, I am suggesting, 
susceptible of the same obvious explanation. 

To sum up, I am suggesting that the difficulty in Ayer’s 
1 See p. 91, above. 


4 


98 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

account of the truth both of analytical and of empirical pro¬ 
positions is that it provides us with no reason why some one 
proposition should be believed to be true and not others; or— 
to put the point in Ayer’s terminology—no reason why the 
result of acting upon the believed truth of one hypothesis 
should be to enable us to anticipate experience by furnishing us 
with the appropriate sensations, but not the result of acting 
upon some different hypothesis. It is, I think, clearly the pur¬ 
pose of most of the propositions which we assert to refer to and, 
if possible, to correspond with the world outside us. But if they 
are to do this, there must be a world outside us for the proposi¬ 
tions to correspond with. For Ayer, as far as I can see, there is 
no such world, or, rather, it is meaningless both to say that there 
is and to say that there is not, since empirical propositions have 
meaning only in terms of the sense-contents which verify them. 
Being unable, therefore, to have recourse to the obvious 
explanation of what it is that we mean when we say of a state¬ 
ment or belief that it is true, which is that it corresponds with 
the world outside us, he is driven to have recourse to such 
expressions as, “a well chosen definition” which “will call our 
attention to analytic truths, which would otherwise have 
escaped us”, or a hypothesis which has the characteristic of 
“enabling us to anticipate experience”. But what Ayer does not 
do is to suggest any reason why, if the characteristic of being 
“well chosen” and the characteristic of “enabling us to 
anticipate experience” are both the meaning and the criteria of 
truth, some definitions should direct our attention fruitfully, 
should, that is to say, direct it to analytic truths which would 
otherwise have escaped us, while others do not. On his view 
these, I suggest, are facts which are purely arbitrary facts. 

(5) The Re-ijication of Words 

A further criticism may, I suggest, be levelled against Ayer’s 
theory of truth on the score of its treatment of words. His 
general view, broadly, is that we know only linguistic facts and 
facts about sense-contents. About the structure of a world 
which consists neither of linguistic facts, nor of sense-contents, 
we can, if he is right, know nothing. 

I will state what I take to be the contrary and traditional 
view, as follows: (i) We can infer a great deal about the world 
from the properties of language, as used, for example, in the 


GENERAL PRINCIPLES AND THEORY OF TRUTH 99 

propositions of logic, (ii) In perception we can know directly 
physical facts which are not parts of our sense-contents. 

Logical Positivism may be described as a sustained attempt 
to discredit this normal view. The attempt seems to me to 
break down by reason of the circumstance to which I have 
already drawn attention in another connexion, 1 that a word 
is not a verbal but is an empirical fact, is, indeed, from this 
point of view, analogous to any other empirical fact, as an 
empirical fact is commonly understood. Hence, when we know 
what words occur in a sentence, what we are knowing is not a 
linguistic but is a non-verbal fact, a fact, moreover, which we 
are knowing as the result of the stimulation of our visual sense- 
organs, when the word is written and of our aural sense-organs, 
when it is spoken. 

If it be admitted that we can know at least one non-verbal 
empirical fact, it is, as I have already suggested, unnecessary 
to explain away our apparent knowledge of other non-verbal 
facts, as, for example, that here are a hundred people and that 
this is a room, by treating the propositions which apparently 
express the facts, not as telling us something about people and 
rooms, but as making assertions (i) about actual and possible 
sense-contents and (ii) about the way in which we have 
chosen to use words, in this case the words “room”, “hundred”, 
and “people”. Moreover, once the point is conceded that words 
are being treated as physical things which exist in the straight¬ 
forward sense of the word “exist” and which can and do 
stimulate our sense-organs, I can proceed to make the further 
point that it must be possible to make statements about them 
which describe their physical structure and the arrangement of 
their constituent letters. The question can then be raised, are 
these statements true? Is, for example, the statement that the 
word, “mode”, succeeds the word, “meaning”, in the sentence, 
“the meaning of an empirical statement is the mode of its 
verification”, true, or the statement that it precedes it? 

This seems to me to be a question which can quite meaning¬ 
fully be asked and answered, the answer being that the former 
statement is true and the latter false. But in saying this, I am 
using the word “true” in the old-fashioned sense of correspon¬ 
dence with fact, the fact being the order of words in a sen¬ 
tence and not in the sense ascribed to it by Logical Positivism, 
1 See ch. V, pp. 81-86. 


100 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

the sense, namely, in which to say that an empirical state¬ 
ment is true, is to say that it enables us to anticipate future 
experience. 

The repudiation of the traditional conception of truth as 
correspondence with the order and arrangement of things 
follows naturally from the logical positivist denial of material 
things and the substitution for them of symbols standing for 
sense-contents. And, indeed, on their view, it is difficult to see 
with what a statement could correspond. But once the existence 
of some physical things, namely, words, be admitted and once 
it is admitted that we can know them and their order in the 
straightforward sense in which we would normally be said 
to know physical facts, it is difficult to see why a true statement 
about words should not be one which correcdy describes their 
character and arrangement, should not, in fact, be a statement 
which corresponds with what is. Nor is it easy to see what other 
meaning could be plausibly assigned to the word, “true”, in 
this connexion. But if this is the meaning of the word, “true”, 
when it is applied to propositions which assert something about 
those physical things which are words and about their arrange¬ 
ment, it is difficult to see why the word, “true”, should be used 
in an entirely different sense when it is applied to propositions 
which make assertions about other physical things. 


CHAPTER VII 


ANALYSIS OF THE SELF 
Ayer's Account of the Self 

Ayer’s account of the nature of the self follows Hume in 
denying the existence of what he calls “a substantial self”. 

The lines of his treatment are as follows: (i) All “things” are 
logical constructions from sense-contents. Therefore, the self is 
a logical construction. (2) We distinguish one object from 
another by reason of the fact “that it is constituted by different 
sense-contents, or by sense-contents differently related”. 
(3) The terms, mental and physical, belong only to “things” 
which are logical constructions from sense-contents; but sense- 
contents are not themselves either mental or physical. Since 
the mind and the body are “things”, the so-called mind-body 
problem is a pseudo problem. (4) The question is raised, can 
a sense-content occur in the sense-history of more than one 
single self? The answer which Ayer gives is that it cannot, 
since sense-experiences are constituted by sense-contents and 
“for any two sense-experiences to belong to the sense-history 
of the same self it is necessary and sufficient that they should 
contain organic sense-contents which are elements of the same 
body”. Now, “it is logically impossible for any organic sense- 
content to be an element of more than one body”. Thus 
personal identity is defined in terms of bodily identity and 
“bodily identity is to be defined in terms of the resemblance and 
continuity of sense-contents”. 

Criticism of Ayer's Account 

(1) Objects or “things” are, we are told, logical construc¬ 
tions. Their elements are sense-contents related in a certain 
way. Let us call this relation X. Now, we distinguish sense- 
experiences belonging to the “self” by reason of the fact that 
they contain “organic sense-contents which are elements of the 
same body”. The way, therefore, in which the sense-contents 
of which a self consists are related is the way in which elements 

IOI 


102 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

of the same body are related. These elements, then, are sense- 
contents between which the relation X holds. But, (a) what is 
this relation? We are not told. ( b ) What we are told is that 
sense-contents may be members of two different “objects”. 
“It is, indeed, not impossible”, says Ayer, “for a sense-content 
to be an element both of a mental and of a physical object.” 
How, then, do we know that the relation is such as to exclude 
the possibility that sense-contents which are elements of the 
logical construction which is a body are also elements of the 
logical construction which is some other body. 

If all sentences referring to the body are translatable into 
sentences referring to sense-contents, and if the same is true of 
sentences referring to the mind and if, in the case of sense- 
contents, the distinction between mental and physical does 
not hold, then this distinction in its application to body and to 
mind may legitimately be described as “pseudo”. But if the 
distinction between mental and physical “objects” is “pseudo”, 
then in saying that it is not impossible for a sense-content to be 
an element of a mental and a physical object, we are not excluding 
the possibility that it may be an element of two physical objects. 
But if this possibility is not excluded, the concept of the 
separateness of bodies, from which the separateness of selves 
is derived, breaks down. 

The Body Reintroduced as a Physical “ Thing ” 

Ayer, as we have seen, denies that this is possible, since he 
says that “it is logically impossible for any organic sense- 
content to be an element of more than one body”. But in the 
light of the foregoing considerations, I find it difficult to avoid 
the conclusion that in making this statement Ayer has in¬ 
advertently reintroduced the familiar notion of the body as a 
physical thing. It is because one physical thing cannot be 
another physical thing, that he tells us that “it is logically 
impossible for any organic sense-content to be an element of 
more than one body”. In other words, it is not so much a 
logical impossibility that is involved here, as a physical im¬ 
possibility. But the notion of a physical impossibility entails the 
notion of a body as a physical thing. And, indeed, it is pre¬ 
cisely this notion, the notion of the body as a physical thing to 
which Ayer’s remarks, when he is off his guard, seem to point. 
Thus, he tells us that his reason for believing that other 


ANALYSIS OF THE SELF 


IO 3 

people understand him is that “his utterances have the effect 
on their actions which” he “regards as appropriate”. Now, 
actions entail bodies which act unless, which I take to be 
improbable, it is held that logical constructions can act? 
If, however, the actions of other people’s bodies are to be 
interpreted solely in terms of the sense-contents of those who 
observe them, these afford us no reason to believe in anything 
but the occurrence of the observer’s sense-contents, no reason, 
therefore, to believe in other people’s bodies, and no reason 
to believe that the owners of those bodies understand Ayer’s 
utterances. 

(2) Ayer’s analysis of the self is in terms of those sense- 
contents which are elements of the same body. This either pre¬ 
supposes the dogma that all experiences are sensory experiences 
which originate in occurrences in the body, or, if other kinds 
of experiences are admitted, excludes them from the series of 
those experiences which constitute the self. 

Now, the view that all experiences are sensory is, as I have 
already suggested, 1 both unverified and unverifiable. 

Let us suppose for the sake of argument that there is such a 
thing as a non-sensory experience; we will suppose, for example, 
that my experience of reflecting on Lord Acton’s dictum to 
the effect that all power corrupts is what it prima facie seems to 
be, a non-sensory experience. It follows, presumably, on Ayer’s 
view, that it does not belong to the self which I regard as mine, 
since it does not “contain organic sense-contents which are 
elements of the same body”. Hence, the self which Ayer con¬ 
cedes is a self which eats and sees but is not a self that calculates 
and thinks. This view seems to contradict the testimony of all 
those who have seemed to enter most fully into themselves in 
the experience of active moral struggle or of meditation and 
contemplation. To exclude such experiences from the defini¬ 
tions of the self seems to be wholly arbitrary. It also excludes 
the self which thinks Ayer’s thoughts and expresses them in 
his books. 

The Existence of Other People 

(3) Ayer, aware that his account may be deemed by some to 
be solipsistic, seeks to rebut the charge. I considered this re¬ 
buttal in Chapter II in relation to the account there contained 

1 See ch. Ill, pp. 50-56. 


104 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

of our knowledge of physical things and gave my reasons for 
finding it unconvincing. 1 

I propose now to consider whether Ayer has any better 
justification for claiming that his account of our knowledge of 
other people succeeds in avoiding Solipsism. He defines other 
people “in terms of their empirical manifestations—that is, 
in terms of the behaviour of their bodies, and ultimately in 
terms of sense-contents”. The question arises, whose sense- 
contents? Certainly not somebody else’s, for it would be absurd 
to say that I know that A exists because his bodily behaviour 
is manifested in the sense-contents of B. The sense-contents 
which are relevant to my knowledge of the existence of other 
people must, then, be my own. The claim is, then, that I know 
that there are other people because “my hypothesis is verified 
by the occurrence in my sense-history of the appropriate series 
of sense-contents”. How, one wonders, does this view escape 
the charge of Solipsism? The escape is made via the assump¬ 
tion that to say that I know that another person exists is 
equivalent to saying that I know that I have certain sensory 
experiences. But this, again, is pure dogma. If, as seems on 
Ayer’s view to be the case, I never know anything but my own 
sense-contents, what possible right have I to take their occur¬ 
rence as indicating or as being caused by or as being equivalent 
to somebody or something else. 

The position stands thus. I know sense-contents and only 
sense-contents. If I follow Ayer, I say that these sense-contents 
stand for or are caused by or indicate or are equivalent to—I 
am not sure which is the right expression—the existence of 
other people who are also defined in terms of my sense-contents. 
But if I never know anything but my own sense-contents, I 
cannot know that they are equivalent to or are caused by or 
indicate or stand for other people. I could only know this, if I 
knew the sense-contents which are elements of the logical con¬ 
structions which are other people’s bodies independently of those 
sense-contents which are elements of my own body. And this, 
we have been told, is impossible, since I can only know those 
sense-contents which are elements of my own body and “it 
is logically impossible for any organic sense-content to be an 
element of more than one body”. Hence, the fact that my own 
sense-contents are equivalent to or stand for or are caused by 
1 See ch. II, pp. 33-35. 


ANALYSIS OF THE SELF 


105 

or indicate the presence of other people must remain a hypo¬ 
thesis which, from its very nature, is unverifiable. 

Summing up we may say that, on Ayer’s view, we live in a 
world of sense-contents, some of which stand in a mysterious 
relation to what are called other people. But the reference to 
other people must remain an act of faith or, rather, two acts 
of faith; first, that our sense-contents emanate from or originate 
in or are somehow related to another person’s body, this being 
like Locke’s substance an “unknown somewhat” and, secondly, 
that they entitle us to conjecture the existence of other people’s 
minds, which are in some undefined way related to the bodies 
to which those sense-contents of mine which entitle me to infer 
other bodies themselves stand in relation. 

Thus the only function which, on this view, we are entitled 
to predicate of another mind is that of being an agency for the 
projection of sense data which become, or are somehow con¬ 
nected with, the sense-contents which form part of my own 
sense-experience. Even if this were a tenable view of what 
another mind is, such projection of sense data does not con¬ 
stitute communication since in the form in which we are aware 
of them, the form in which they figure as our sense-contents, 
they are irremediably private. 

Return of the Old-fashioned, Concept of Self 

(4) Ayer denies that the self is “substantial” on the familiar 
ground that it is analysable into a number of sense-experiences 
“in the sense that to say anything about the self is always to 
say something about sense-experiences”. No grounds are given 
for this assertion which, presumably, is taken to follow from the 
general pre-suppositions of Logical Positivism. Its acceptance, 
however, brings up the difficulty constituted by Ayer’s denial 
that “the sense-experiences which constitute the self are in any 
sense parts of it”. It is not clear to me in what sense the ex¬ 
pression “part” is here used. If I am told that X is reducible 
to A, B, G, D, either in the physical sense, in which a machine 
is reducible to nuts, bolts, levers, screws and so on until all its 
constituent parts have been enumerated, or in the logical 
sense in which to say something about X is always to say some¬ 
thing about A, B, G, or D, or about all of them, I feel justified 
in concluding that A, B, G, D, are all parts of X. I do not press 
this point, as it may well be that I have misunderstood Ayer. 


106 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

What, however, is clear to me is that just as the old notion 
of the body as a physical thing creeps back unnoticed, so does 
the old notion of the self as a single, unifying activity. Thus, 
we are told that all “sense-experiences and the sense-contents 
which form part of them, are private to a single self”. If the 
self is a logical construction out of sense-experiences, it follows 
that some sense-contents, those, namely, which form part of 
the set of sense-experiences which “are private to a single self” 
belong to that set and of no other set. Assuming that the word, 
“belong”, here means “are elements of”, what are we to make 
of the assertion that a sense-content may be an element of more 
than one object? And why should those sense-contents which 
form part of the particular set of sense-experiences which “are 
private to a single self” be distinguished from others by reason 
of the fact that they can belong to one object, the self, and one 
only? The answer, I suggest, can only be that they are so dis¬ 
tinguished because they are related in a particular way, in 
that way, namely, which would be described by saying that 
they belong to a self in the ordinary sense of the word, “belong”, 
and the ordinary sense of the word, “self”, the sense in which the 
self can be said to have experiences. And that this is precisely 
the way in which Ayer does think of the self, when he forgets 
the preceding analysis, is indicated by such phrases as “the 
activity of theorizing is ... a creative activity” and “scientific 
laws are often discovered through a process of intuition”. What, 
then, creates, what intuits? A set of sense-contents? I find the 
notion difficult to entertain. Is it not obvious that these expres¬ 
sions of Ayer’s pre-suppose the ordinary notion of a self or 
mind as an activity which does something, which creates, which 
intuits, and not of mind which is only a logical construction out 
of sense-contents? 

Self-Consciousness 

(5) A similar conclusion is thrust upon us by the account given 
of self-consciousness. “All that is involved in self-consciousness”, 
Ayer says, “is the ability of a self to remember some of its 
earlier states.” Again, no reasons are given for this analysis 
which is announced dogmatically. Now, when I am aware of 
myself as writing at a table, I do not prima facie appear to my¬ 
self to be remembering anything. Moreover, it seems to me that 
my experience is not confined to being aware of the hardness 


ANALYSIS OF THE SELF 


107 

of the table and the whiteness of the page, and so on. I ex¬ 
perience myself, or can do so, as feeling the one and noticing 
the other, and in saying this, I am saying that I am conscious 
of myself. Now it seems to me clearly false to say that all I am 
doing in being thus conscious of myself as feeling and noticing 
is remembering my earlier states. But, even if this account were 
true, what is it that does the remembering? Does a sense- 
content remember anything? 

Conclusion 

The suggestion that underlies this question is that Ayer is 
mistaken in denying the existence of an underlying, unifying 
self. This denial is, of course, consistent with his general ban 
upon unobservable metaphysical entities. Admitting that the 
self cannot be observed in the sense in which a sense-experience 
can be observed, I should reply that, just as our perceptions of 
a table are taken as clues to the existence of an underlying some¬ 
thing to which the perceptions point and which is the cause of 
our having them, 1 and just as the observations of the scientist 
are taken as clues to a reality which is, in fact, observed only 
partially and often misleadingly, as when a scientist sees a 
stick bent and says that it is straight, or sees two faces of a 
cube and knows that it has six, or photographs a streak on a 
misty surface and infers the passage of an electron, so, I should 
say, the experiences of which we are conscious are all of them 
clues to a reality, the reality of the self, which has the experience 
and unites them, conferring upon them that special relation 
to each other which I describe by saying that all of them are 
mine. Hence, the mistake which, as it seems to me, Ayer makes 
in seeking to deny the continuing, metaphysical entity which is 
the self, is analogous to his mistake in denying the entity which 
is the table and the order of reality which is the world that 
science studies. 


1 See ch. IV, pp. 75-78. 


CHAPTER VIII 


THEORY OF VALUE 

Three main theories, or types of theory are commonly 
maintained in regard to value: 

{A) The Subjective; 

(£) The Emotive, and 

(C) The Objective. 

In this chapter I shall be mainly concerned with (£), the 
emotive, since of all the doctrines of Logical Positivism this 
has attracted the most notice, as it has certainly exerted the 
greatest influence. I shall indicate at the end of the chapter 
certain considerations which tell in favour of theories of 
type (C). 

(A) SUBJECTIVE THEORIES OF VALUE 

(i) Direct Subjective Theories 

These need not detain us as they are explicitly rejected by 
Ayer on two grounds: ( a ) He holds that what I mean when I 
call an action, “right” or a thing “good” cannot be, as direct 
Subjectivism asserts, that I or most people approve of it, since 
it is not self-contradictory to say that some actions which are 
approved of either by me or by most people are not right. 
(. b ) According to Subjectivism, ethical judgments express 
propositions about people’s feelings and can, therefore, be 
either true or false. On Ayer’s view, ethical judgments do not 
express propositions at all, and cannot, therefore, be either 
true or false; they merely give vent to feelings. 

There is, however, a particular argument, not given by 
Ayer, against Subjectivism which may conveniently be men¬ 
tioned here, since it has relevance to Ayer’s own theory. The 
argument is this. According to Subjectivism, “X is right” 
means X is approved of by me, or by my society because—I am 
stating the most common form of the view—it is expedient for, 
or conduces to the advantage, or contributes to the happiness 

108 


THEORY OF VALUE 


109 

of me or of my society. In other words, prima facie ethical state¬ 
ments are analysed into non-ethical statements. Accounts are, 
then, furnished of the way in which my emotions of approval 
were originally aroused by X and reasons are brought forward 
to explain why it is that I approve of what I do. Some of these 
accounts take cognizance of considerations derived from anthro¬ 
pology and call in witness the habits of primitive tribes; others, 
of considerations from sociology which stress the effects of 
social conditioning in determining our likes and dislikes; others, 
of considerations from psychology in general and psycho¬ 
analysis in particular. Perhaps the commonest form of explana¬ 
tion is that which maintains that I approve of actions of the 
type X now because their performance was conducive to the 
safety of the social group to which my ancestors belonged. 

The argument which I wish to advance against this view is 
this: if to say “X is right” or “X is good” means “I approve of 
X”, and if I approve of X because it now, or was once ex¬ 
pedient for my social group, why did such expressions as “right” 
and “good” come to be used? 

The meaning of right is, on this view, exhaustively reducible 
to the meaning of expedient; that is, the word “right” has no 
distinctive meaning which is not covered by the meaning of 
the word, “expedient”. Why, then, was the word “right” 
invented, and how did it come to be used as if it meant some¬ 
thing different from expedient? Generalizing the question, we 
proceed to ask how, on this view, the whole body of ethical 
notions with their apparently distinctive implications came to 
be distinguished from the notions conveyed by the word 
“expediency”? 

If there are bona fide ethical sentiments, we can see why 
exhortations couched in ethical terms should appeal to them. 
But if there are not, if there are only self-interest and social 
conditioning, why should specifically ethical expressions be 
regarded as having meaning and why should they produce a 
hortative effect, since there is, after all, on this view, no 
specific ethical sense or sentiment for them to appeal to? 
Hence, my questions are, first, if there is no such thing as a 
specifically ethical sentiment, how did ethical terms come to be 
invented, and, secondly, granted that for some unexplained 
reason they were invented, how did their employment serve 
the purpose which, on this view, led to their invention, the 


IIO A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

purpose namely, of securing the performance of activities which 
were useful to the social group. 

Granted in a word that ethics is a delusion or a rationaliza¬ 
tion, why was it thought necessary to invent the delusion and 
perform the rationalization? And wherein did their practical 
usefulness originate. 

My suggestion is that even if ethical expressions are meaning¬ 
less and moral judgments baseless, being only disguised forms 
of non-ethical expressions and factual judgments, Subjectivism 
fails to account for the fact that ethical expressions and moral 
judgments present themselves for analysis on subjectivist or on 
any other lines. 

(2) Indirect Subjective Theories. That Values are “Human” and are 
“ Created ” 

Many writers speak of values as being “created”, presum¬ 
ably by us. They also refer to them as “human”. This position 
is far from clear. What does the phrase “human values” mean? 
Values belonging to human beings? Presumably not; nobody, 
I take it, wishes to maintain that there is some absolute and 
intrinsic value attaching to the mere fact of being a human 
being. Nor, I imagine, does anybody suppose that the fact that 
I perceive truth or enjoy beauty makes me either truthful or 
beautiful, any more than the fact that I perceive squareness 
makes me square. It is probable, then, that the expression 
“human values” means nothing more than “values” created by 
human beings. 

The question arises, is the creation of these values arbitrary, 
in the sense that we create precisely what values we please 
without let or hindrance from the nature of things, the universe 
being itself without value, a clean slate for the value-writing of 
the human mind, or is it to some extent determined by the 
nature of the environment in which the human mind develops 
and to which it reacts? 

(i) Implications of the View that Value-Creating is Arbitrary . 
If it is arbitrary, then no one set of values possesses more 
validity than another. When we ascribe value to anything, 
saying, for example, that one action, political system, poem or 
work of art is better than another, we are merely giving expres¬ 
sion to our own preferences, preferences which, on this view, 


THEORY OF VALUE 


111 

are without authority or justification. For even if we say that 
one action or system is more liable to promote happiness than 
another, happiness which is itself, on this view, merely some¬ 
thing that some or most human beings happen to desire, has 
no authority to command men’s actions. Happiness is not, 
that is to say, something that ought to be pursued, because it 
is desirable as well as desired. 

There is, then, no ground for preferring kindness to cruelty— 
one’s actual preference for the former is on a par with one’s 
preference for asparagus over artichokes—and no rational 
justification for objecting to the Nazi theories of politics or the 
horrors of the concentration camps which were the instruments 
of their application. There are many objections to this view, 
but the most potent is that nobody really holds it. 

Alternatively, it might be held that to say of something that 
it was “right” or “good” or “beautiful” means merely that 
most people prefer it, “right”, “good” and “beautiful” being 
values which we have invented to commend and to dignify 
what most people happen to like. The implications of this view 
are revolting. Most people prefer the music of Gershwin to the 
music of Bach, just as most people prefer to act in accordance 
with the dictates of egoism rather than in accordance with the 
doctrines of Christ. If this view were true, in so far as the word 
“better” could be said to have any distinctive meaning, we 
should be driven to say that the music of Gershwin is “better” 
than the music of Beethoven, and the ethics of self-interest 
“better” than those of the Sermon on the Mount. This, once 
again, is a conclusion which few, if any, really believe. 

Nor, I venture to add, is the meaning which this view 
attributes to the word “right” one that anybody really believes 
it to bear. For to say that “right” is a “human value” means 
presumably that “right” is a label which men have invented 
to attach to the things of which most of them approve. Hence, 
to say, “X is right” is, as Hume maintained, merely to say 
that most men do or have approved of it. This makes rightness 
(and wrongness) a matter of statistics to be established by the 
process of counting heads. It follows that if a discussion arises 
in regard to two actions, X and Y, as to which of them is in 
the circumstances right, the discussion really turns upon a 
matter of fact and could theoretically be settled by an appeal 
to fact. If 51 per cent of those who are acquainted with the 


112 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

two actions approved of X and only 49 per cent of Y, then X 
would ipso facto be right. Now, whatever view in regard to 
ethical matters may be correct, this view as to what the word 
“right 5 5 means is, I think, clearly incorrect. Nor, I think, does 
anybody seriously hold it. 

(ii) Implications of the View that Value-Creating is not Arbitrary. 
Now let us suppose that the human creation of values is not 
purely arbitrary. The implications are that in creating value 
the human mind is responsive to or subject to something other 
than itself to which it is meaningful to say its deliverances can 
conform, and to which, if they are correct, they do conform. 
A man, we must suppose, can make an infinite number of com¬ 
putations as to the degree of worth to be attributed to an 
action, a character, or a work of art. But he can make one, and 
only one, correct computation. Of a correct computation we 
can say that it is one that “conforms to the facts 55 , or “reflects 
the situation 55 or “faithfully represents what is 55 . This is not to 
say that a man’s mind is constrained by the facts—if it were, 
it would not be possible to make mistakes—but merely that its 
computations are not necessarily arbitrary, seeing that one of 
them and one only will conform to the facts, and that this is the 
one that a morally good man, or a man with aesthetic sensi¬ 
bility will do his best to make. What is more, if he has been 
well trained and properly instructed as a youth, and remains 
as a man subject to the influences of a morally good and aesthe¬ 
tically harmonious environment then, as he grows in practice 
and experience, his computations, both in ethics and aesthetics, 
will approximate to the facts with ever-increasing closeness. 
Now this, I suggest, is precisely what is meant by saying that a 
man’s moral judgments and tastes are good and that they are 
improving. 

To put the point differently, if the creation of value by 
the human mind is not arbitrary, it would seem to follow 
that the external world has an objective structure, such that 
one set of “created” values reflects the structure more accur¬ 
ately than another. Nor from this point of view is it material 
whether the objective structure is itself conceived as a value 
structure or whether, from the point of view of value, it is 
conceived as objectively neutral, and value as created by the 
mind which responds to it. For the distinguishing characteristic 


THEORY OF VALUE 


”3 

of the view is to be found less in its affirmation that reality 
contains features and factors of value, than in its insistence that 
reality does contain independent features, determinate marks, 
articulations—call them what you will—such that the human 
mind when confronted with them responds to them by the 
creation of values. And, as the computation-view, so too on this 
view it will be meaningful to say that some of the values which 
are created, some of the value judgments which are made, will 
correspond to the features of what is more accurately than 
others. 

It is not my purpose here to develop the implications of these 
views. Let me, however, briefly recapitulate what they have in 
common: (a) The nature of the non-sensory world is struc- 
turated, that is to say, it contains features in its own right. 
( b ) These features may be axiologically neutral or they may be 
values. In either event, they are objectively embedded in the 
structure of reality, (c) The human mind intuits 1 the presence 
of these features by an act of rational insight. As a consequence 
it either becomes aware of values, if the features are them¬ 
selves values, or creates values, if reality, though structurated, 
is itself valueless. These created values correspond to or 
reflect, with a greater or less degree of accuracy, the features 
whose apprehension by the mind stimulates it to the act of 
creation. On either view, the mind’s activity when it knows or 
is aware of value is a response to something which is given to 
it and which it apprehends. Hence the knowledge of values is 
either an activity of awareness, whereby value is directly 
revealed to the mind, or an activity of creation stimulated by 
and conforming with more or less accuracy to features of the 
giver which are presented to the mind and stimulate it to the 
activity of value creation. Such a view would concede most of 
what an objective theory of value requires and is, in fact, 
logically reducible to the type of theory described in ( C ). 

( 3 ) THE EMOTIVE THEORY OF VALUES 

(1) Ethics 

Ayer distinguishes his view both from subjectivist and 
objectivist theories of ethics. Subjectivism is, as we have seen, 

1 1 do not venture to define the word, “intuit”. I mean by it an activity of the 
mind which combines the immediacy of sense-perception with that characteristic 
of intelligence, which is its capacity to be aware of the non-sensory. Intuition 
is, then, the immediate awareness of the nature of the non-sensory. 


114 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

rejected, (i) because it is not self-contradictory to say that we 
sometimes approve, or that most men sometimes approve, of 
what is bad and wrong; and (ii) because it holds that what are 
prima facie ethical judgments express genuine propositions, 
that is to say, propositions to the effect that I, or some or most, 
people approve of so and so, whereas, on his view, they express 
no propositions of any kind. As against Subjectivism, he main¬ 
tains that, “the validity of ethical judgments . . . must be 
regarded as ‘absolute’ or ‘intrinsic’ and not empirically 
calculable”. This does not, however, mean, as one might be 
tempted to conclude, that Ayer believes in objective or absolu¬ 
tist ethics and holds that ethical judgments uniquely refer to 
and report the objective and independently existing features of 
ethical situations. 

Indeed, he is precluded from adopting such a view by his 
general repudiation of metaphysics, since judgments that “so 
and so is good and right” are not empirically verifiable, and 
are, therefore, consigned by Ayer’s general theory to the 
category of metaphysical, that is to say, of meaningless, state¬ 
ments. “Considering”, Ayer writes, “the use which we have 
made of the principle that a synthetic proposition is significant 
only if it is empirically verifiable, it is clear that the acceptance 
of an ‘absolutist’ theory of ethics would undermine the whole 
of our main argument.” His position is, indeed, nearer to that 
of the subjectivists than to that of the absolutists in that what 
avowedly interests him is “the possibility of reducing the whole 
sphere of ethical terms to non-ethical terms. We are enquiring” 
he says, “whether statements of ethical value can be translated 
into statements of empirical fact.” 

The conclusion which the enquiry reaches is that they can, 
indeed, be reduced to non-ethical terms, though scarcely to 
“statements of empirical fact”, since they are for Ayer merely 
verbal ejaculations of emotion and though emotions are 
empirical facts to make noises which ejaculate them is not to 
state them. His view briefly is that “sentences which contain 
normative ethical symbols are not equivalent to sentences 
which express psychological propositions or, indeed, empirical 
propositions of any kind”. For ethical concepts are pseudo¬ 
concepts; that is to say, the presence of an ethical symbol in a 
sentence adds nothing either to its factual content or to its 
meaning. Thus, if I say, “ ‘you acted wrongly in stealing that 


THEORY OF VALUE 


1 15 

money’,” what I am saying is equivalent to the factual state¬ 
ment, “you stole that money”, plus an ejaculation of dis¬ 
approval: “It is as if I had said, ‘You stole that money’, in a 
peculiar tone of horror, or written it with the addition of some 
special exclamation marks. The tone or the exclamation 
marks add nothing to the literal meaning of the sentence. It 
merely serves to show that the expression of it is attended by 
certain feelings in the speaker.” When the sentence is general¬ 
ized into an ethical statement which purports to have universal 
significance, it is declared to have no factual meaning of any 
kind: “ ‘Stealing money is wrong’,” is equivalent to “ ‘Stealing 
money!!’ —where the shape and thickness of the exclamation 
marks show, by a suitable convention, that a special sort of 
moral disapproval is the feeling which is being expressed. It is 
clear that there is nothing said here which can be true or 
false.” It follows that sentences “which express moral judg¬ 
ments do not say anything. They are pure expressions of feeling 
and as such do not come under the category of truth and false¬ 
hood”, the correct definition of the meaning of ethical words, 
when used normatively, being in terms of, “the different 
feelings they are ordinarily taken to express, and also the 
different responses which they are calculated to provoke”. 

Such is the emotive theory of ethics. It may be summarized 
in the statement that the ethical terms which occur in sentences 
which would commonly be said to express ethical judgments 
are purely “emotive”, that is to say, they are “used to express 
feeling about certain objects but not to make any assertion 
about them”. 

The difference of this view from Subjectivism now clearly 
emerges. According to Subjectivism, the validity of ethical 
judgments is determined by the feelings of some person or 
persons. On Ayer’s view, they have no validity, and are 
incapable of being either true or false. In the light of this 
conclusion, it seems to me a little disingenuous for Ayer to 
defend himself against the charge which he conceives Oxonian 
to have made in the article referred to in the Introduction to 
this book, 1 by saying—as he did in a letter to the New Statesman 
—“I do not ‘exclude’ value judgments. What I do is to dis¬ 
tinguish them from judgments of fact.” The interpretation of 
this statement depends, no doubt, upon what is meant by the 

1 See Introduction, p. 9. 


Il6 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

word, “exclude”, Ayer, in fact, pronounces value judgments to 
be meaningless; they are for him noises expressive of emotion. 
This is assuredly “to distinguish them from judgments of fact”, 
but most people would take the view that it is also to “exclude” 
them. If to declare a statement to be meaningless is not to 
“exclude” it, it is difficult to see what meaning the word 
“exclude” can bear. 

(2) Theology 

It is not necessary to follow in detail the implications of the 
emotive theory as regards theology, since mutatis mutandis , they 
are the same as the implications in regard to ethics. It is worth 
while, however, in the light of our concern with the effects of 
the spread of logical positivist doctrines upon contemporary 
thinking, to state clearly what the implications are. 

Granted the assumption that experience means only sensory 
experience, no statements that can be made about God are 
empirically verifiable. God, therefore, is a metaphysical term; 
therefore, He falls under the general ban on metaphysical 
terms, and all statements about Him are dismissed as being 
meaningless. In fact, they are nonsensical—Ayer explicitly says, 
that “all utterances about the nature of God are nonsensical”. 
Hence, it cannot meaningfully be said either that God exists 
or that He does not. “For to say that ‘God exists’ is to make a 
metaphysical utterance which cannot be either true or false. 
And by the same criterion, no sentence which purports to 
describe the nature of a transcendant god can possess any 
literal significance.” 

Ayer is at pains to distinguish this view both from atheism 
and from agnosticism. Atheism holds that it is improbable that 
God exists. The atheist is, therefore, stating a meaningful pro¬ 
position, “it is improbable that God exists”, which he holds to 
be true. The agnostic also maintains a proposition about God, 
the proposition, namely, that the existence of God is a possibility 
which there is no good reason either to assert or to deny and 
this proposition, which is meaningful and which is capable of 
being either true or false, he believes to be true. 

But Ayer’s view cuts at the root of both these positions. If 
no meaningful statements can be made about God, it is 
meaningless to say that it is improbable that He exists and 
meaningless to say that there is no good ground either for 


THEORY OF VALUE 


1 17 

asserting or denying His existence. In short, “the notion of a 
person whose essential attributes are non-empirical is not an 
intelligible notion at all 5 ’. The conclusion that theology which 
assumes the existence of God and proceeds to make statements 
about His nature, purposes and relation to mankind is non¬ 
sensical, is one which, if accepted, must, as it seems to me, 
produce a decided effect upon the mind that accepts it. 

In regard to this conclusion also it seems to me highly mis¬ 
leading to say that it “does not exclude value judgments”. 

(3) Summary of Emotive Theory of Values 

It is, Ayer thinks, an implication of the emotive theory that 
ethical and aesthetic judgments provide us with information 
about our feelings which is of interest to the psychologist. I am 
not sure whether this statement is wholly consistent with the 
“nonsense” conclusion previously reached. If aesthetic and 
moral judgments do provide such information it can only be 
because to say “this action is right”, or “this picture is beauti¬ 
ful”, is to throw light upon our feelings, upon those feelings, 
namely, which the judgment expresses. If this is the case, it is 
hard to see how the propositions in which the judgments are 
expressed can be “nonsensical”, since nonsense is a meaning¬ 
less set of noises which cannot, one would suppose, give us any 
information about anything. 

Ayer further tells us that ethical enquiries provide material 
which may be of interest to the sociologist and also, presumably, 
to the anthropologist. While it is the psychologist’s task to 
investigate and describe the various feelings which ethical terms 
express and the reactions they provoke, it is the task of the 
anthropologist and the sociologist to tabulate the moral habits 
of a given group of people as evidenced by the ethical judg¬ 
ments which they habitually pass, and to enquire how they 
came to have such habits with their associated interests and 
feelings. 

But whether we say that moral, religious and aesthetic 
judgments give us no information at all, or whether we say that 
they do give us information about our physical and mental 
make-up and the habits of the group to which we belong, 
makes no difference to the significant conclusion that they 
give us no information about the nature of things except in so 
far as our feelings, our bodies and the social group to which 


Il8 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

we belong themselves form part of the nature of things. But it 
is certainly not about these that they purport to give us infor¬ 
mation. 

(4) Generalized, Statement of the Emotive Position in Bertrand 
Russell's Work 

A similar view is put forward in Bertrand Russell’s later 
philosophical writings. Thus, in the final chapter of his A 
History of Western Philosophy Russell specifically limits human 
knowledge to knowledge of the empirical world studied by 
science, declaring that whatever lies outside that world is a 
matter of feeling and not of knowledge. It follows that there is 
no knowledge of value. Now, a considerable part of philosophy 
has traditionally been devoted to a study and discussion of 
value and this study, it has been thought, might not inconceiv¬ 
ably yield results which could be demonstrated. But it is obvious 
that if the universe does not contain any objective realm 
of non-sensory fact, philosophy cannot give us true informa¬ 
tion about such an order. In particular, if it does not contain 
a moral order which is independent of human minds, ethical 
philosophy cannot provide us with knowledge of social laws and 
principles. 

With what sort of information, then, on Russell’s view, does 
ethical philosophy, as traditionally conceived, provide us? 
The answer appears to be that it provides us with information 
about matters of feeling or, perhaps—I am not sure what is 
the right phraseology to use—it is merely the verbalized 
expression of feeling. 

The following quotation from Bertrand Russell’s A History 
of Western Philosophy furnishes a good illustration of this attitude 
to ethics. Having described the methods and indicated the 
scope of what he calls “analytical empiricism”, he writes: 
“There remains, however, a vast field, traditionally included 
in philosophy, where scientific methods are inadequate. This 
field includes ultimate questions of value; science alone, for 
example, cannot prove that it is bad to enjoy the infliction of 
cruelty. Whatever can be known, can be known by means of 
science; but things which are legitimately matters of feeling lie out¬ 
side its province .” (My italics.) 

The implication clearly is that values cannot be known and that 
the evaluation of cruelty as morally reprobatory is merely a 


THEORY OF VALUE 


"9 

matter of feeling. We may feel, most of us, that kindness is 
better, but feelings have no authority over those who do not 
share them, and we have, therefore, nothing to say to the guard 
in the concentration camp who prefers cruelty; we can only 
make noises expressive of our feelings of repulsion. 

Criticism of the Emotive Theory of Values 

(i) Difficulty of Sustaining the Theory's Implications. The first 
observation that I wish to make upon the position just sum¬ 
marized takes the form not of an argument directed to showing 
that the theory is false—although such arguments are, I 
believe, available and some of them are advanced below— 
but of an exposure of the inconsistencies into which those who 
seek to maintain it are unwittingly betrayed. 

Some inconsistencies in Ayer’s statement have been pointed 
out in the preceding pages. The “feeling” view of values is, 
however, as we have seen also maintained by Bertrand 
Russell. Bertrand Russell’s latest philosophical position falls 
relevantly within the scope of this book, since he both shares 
Ayer’s influence over the minds of philosophically minded 
persons of the younger generation and has himself exercised 
considerable influence over Ayer’s views. I propose, therefore, 
to examine Russell’s theory of value with a view to drawing 
attention to certain inconsistencies into which, as it seems to me, 
his statement of it falls. I will begin with his treatment of the 
value of truth. 

Russell on Truth 

Russell’s chapter on Aristotle’s logic in A History of Western 
Philosophy contains a brilliant summary of the criticisms ^which 
modern philosophers, partly under Russell’s guidance, have 
brought against the Aristotelian system and an indication of 
the considerations which have led to its supersession. Now, 
throughout this criticism it is implied that on certain points 
Aristotle is wrong and that modern logicians have shown him 
to be wrong. Aristotle’s logic, we are told, would have been all 
very well if it had been “a stage in a continual progress”. In 
fact it was “a dead end” which put a stop to all thinking on 
logic for two thousand years. For long regarded as completely 
and finally true, it is, as Russell points out, vitiated by specifi¬ 
able errors. Because of them, we can now see that it is not true. 


120 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

Is logic, then, science? Assuredly not. Yet we have been told 
that only within the sphere of science is exact and definite 
truth obtainable. I see no escape from the conclusion that 
Russell holds (i) that there is such a thing as truth, (ii) that we 
may know it, in the sense of knowing in regard to some things 
that they are true and in regard to others that they are false, 
and (iii) that the relevance of truth is not confined to those 
matters of fact with which science deals. This conclusion is 
reinforced by an unguarded utterance that slips into Russell’s 
treatment of Plotinus: “A philosophical system”, he says, 
“may be judged important for various reasons. The first and 
most obvious is that we think it may be true.” I agree, but take 
leave to doubt whether, on his own premises, Russell is ever 
entitled to judge a system to be important for “this first and 
most obvious ... of reasons”. 

Again, it is relevant to point out that “scientific truthfulness” 
is a virtue which, Russell claims, his own school has introduced 
into philosophy. Now, Russell himself would not, I take it, 
wish to maintain that his philosophy is science. 

It may be argued that in these passages it is not truth in the 
sense in which philosophers have traditionally invoked and 
paid tribute to truth, as an independent value , that Russell has in 
mind. But more significant avowals are to come; for presently 
we find Russell postulating the presence in the universe of 
an objective order, an order of “stubborn facts”, which the 
human mind explores but does not create and to which it is 
subject. In this mood he bids us adopt a modest attitude to 
objective fact and warns us against allowing reason to legislate, 
instead of requiring it to conform to the universe. 

From the standpoint of this attitude Russell sharply criticizes 
the “power philosophies” of the earlier twentieth century, of 
which he takes John Dewey’s as an example. Dewey is criticized 
for substituting for the concept of truth that of “warranted 
assertability”. “Warranted assertability” means apparently 
that, if we believe in something hard enough and say it often 
enough and if enough of us do this, it will become true or “as 
nearly ‘true’ as we can make it”, the point being that, on 
Dewey’s view, facts are not “stubborn” but are in the last 
resort made by human minds. Russell sums up Dewey’s position 
as follows: “If I find the belief that Caesar crossed the Rubicon 
very distasteful, I need not sit down in dull despair; I can, if 


THEORY OF VALUE 


12 I 


I have enough skill and power, arrange a social environment 
in which the statement that he did not cross the Rubicon will 
have ‘warranted assertability’.” 

Now this view Russell connects very properly with the 
current belief in human power which is fostered by the success 
of science, the spread of industrialism and collective enterprise. 
It is, indeed, par excellence the belief which is suitable to man 
in his capacity of manipulator of nature. Russell criticizes 
it on two grounds. First, it disintegrates the notion of truth 
in the sense in which to be true is to conform and correspond 
with, instead of prescribing to, objective fact. 

Secondly, it savours of what he calls “cosmic impiety”, for it 
was precisely the concept of truth as dependent upon facts 
beyond our control which kept men humble. Modern man, 
Russell hints, has lost the sense of a non-human world order to 
which the human is subject and as a result has grown “too big 
for his boots”, not in the role of a Prometheus defying the gods 
or of the lordly “great man” of the Renaissance, but through 
the collective power of his communities. 

The modern community, drunk with its power over nature, 
would, he thinks, do well to bear in mind the Greek conception 
of “a Necessity or Fate superior even to Zeus” by which man is 
bound and to beware of the sin of hubris. To abolish the concept 
of a non-human order of objective fact is to remove this check 
upon human pride. The consequences I put in Russell’s own 
words: 

“When the check upon pride is removed, a further step is 
taken on the road towards a certain kind of madness—the 
intoxication of power—which invaded philosophy with Fichte, 
and to which modern men, whether philosophers or not, are 
prone.” 

In this and similar passages Russell, as it seems to me, is 
maintaining either explicity or by implication: (i) that there is 
an objective order of reality given to and not created by us to 
which the human mind is subject and by which human power 
is limited; (ii) that truth consists in the knowledge and realiza¬ 
tion by the human mind of the nature of this order, and that 
such knowledge and realization are valuable for their own sakes 
(and this, I take it, is precisely what most men have meant when 
they have talked of the value of truth), if only because (iii) lack¬ 
ing an awareness of this order, the human spirit becomes guilty 


122 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

of the sin of cosmic impiety, that is to say, of aspiring to a posi¬ 
tion in the universe which its status does not warrant. 

This avowal seems to me to concede most of what those who 
have asserted the existence not only of an objective truth but of 
a moral order in the universe have wished to claim. Moreover, 
the attitude to this order which Russell commends is essen¬ 
tially a religious attitude. 

It is, however, an attitude which, I submit, would be totally 
without justification, if Russell were right in his earlier claims 
that the only knowledge that we can have is the kind of knowledge 
that science gives, and that everything that lies outside the 
scope of science belongs to the sphere of mere feeling. If religion 
were merely an affair of feeling owning the same ontological 
status as a feeling of fear at the dentist’s, a feeling of distaste for 
lobster, or of pleasure in sexual intercourse, it would be as 
impossible to explain its history or to account for its hold over 
the minds of men, as to justify Russell’s rebuke of the sin of 
cosmic impiety. 

And on Morals and Politics 

Russell’s warning against this sin takes the argument from 
the sphere of truth to that of morals. Here, too, from time to 
time an unguarded utterance betrays a belief totally at variance 
with the view officially advocated as expressed, for example, in 
the quotation cited above, to the effect that “science . . . cannot 
prove that it is bad to enjoy the infliction of cruelty”, with its 
implication that the fact that cruelty is bad—since, after all, 
nothing else can prove it—cannot be known but only felt. Is 
Russell, one wonders, following the emotive theory of values, 
prepared to regard his repudiation of cruelty—and no man in 
our time has denounced it with greater courage and consistency 
than himself—as merely an expression of a personal dislike? Ac¬ 
cording to the emotive theory, to say “this is cruel” is to make 
a statement of fact which may be true or false; to add “this 
is wicked and ought to be stopped” is not to make a factual 
statement at all, but merely to ventilate an emotion. Does 
Russell, one wonders, really believe this and believe, too, that 
the contrary judgment, “cruelty is good and ought to be 
increased”, or rather, the contrary feeling which this judgment 
expresses, is of just as much and just as little worth, and has 
therefore, just as much and just as little title to respect in theory 


THEORY OF VALUE 


123 

and to expression in action, as the feeling expressed by his own 
reprobation and denunciation of cruelty? If he does, it is hard 
to resist the temptation to point out that a great deal of his 
writing on ethical topics in such books as Marriage and Morals 
and The Conquest of Happiness is beside the point, for these books 
contain powerful exposures of the evils of repression and cruelty 
and eloquent exhortations to practise the virtue of kindness, 
especially to children. 

A similar point emerges in regard to Russell’s political 
writings which present an equally striking contrast to his meta¬ 
physical views, more particularly as regards his account of the 
nature of the self. This account is not unlike Ayer’s , 1 whose 
thought on this and kindred matters has, it is obvious, been 
largely influenced by Russell. The self is, for Russell, a series 
or sequence of psychological states linked together by the feeling 
of interest which is felt by any one member of the series for other 
members of the same series; or, perhaps, it would be more 
correct to say that the self is a logical construction out of psycho¬ 
logical states. When it is remembered that these states are not 
strictly speaking mental at all, since the categories of mind 
and body are not ultimate but are only derivative from more 
fundamental elements which may be regarded as mental in 
certain contexts and as bodily in others, the degree to which 
Russell’s view of the self departs from the traditional conception 
of a substantial, spiritual self which is at once a unity and the 
seat of personality—the self, in fact, which Hume criticizes—is 
sufficiently obvious. The self, for Russell, is neither a continuing 
entity, nor is it a unity; on the contrary, he dismisses as a meta¬ 
physical abstraction the continuing self which common sense 
takes for granted and which traditional philosophy affirms. 
The notion of personality undergoes a similar process of dis¬ 
integration. 

In his political writings, notably in such books as The Prin¬ 
ciples of Social Reconstruction , Freedom and Organization and the 
Reith lectures Russell stands forth as the champion of the indi¬ 
vidual against the State. Individual freedom is acclaimed as a 
good; individual spontaneity is declared to be valuable and 
important; the ever-increasing encroachment of the State upon 
the spheres of individual liberty and initiative are deplored, 
while protection is demanded against undue State interference. 

1 Sec ch. VII, p. 101 . 


124 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

The implications are (i) that the individual is a person; (ii) 
that personality is continuing, individual and important; (iii) 
that it is the fount of creativity and the vehicle of initiative; (iv) 
that it must, therefore, be protected, and (v) that its protection 
is a duty which those who care for the goods which are dis¬ 
tinctive of humanity, notably freedom and creativity, must seek 
to discharge. These are admirable sentiments, but they are such 
as to presuppose a view of the individual personality as a unity 
which is a continuing unity, retaining its identity through 
change and development, a unity which initiates action, sus¬ 
tains purposes and gives birth to creations. They are surely in¬ 
consistent with a view of the self as a metaphysical abstraction 
and of the individual personality as lacking any unity save that 
which belongs to a series of related psychological states. Who, 
after all, would wish to claim freedom for a series of related 
psychological states? The two levels of discourse are not merely 
different; they are incompatible. 

I suggest that one of the reasons why the inconsistencies of 
which I have cited examples invade the unguarded moments of 
philosophers who share Ayer’s general view of ethical and 
aesthetic values, is that their doctrine is extremely difficult to 
believe, so difficult that, if the apparent impoliteness of the 
suggestion may be pardoned, one is sometimes led to wonder 
whether its advocates believe it themselves. For my part, I find 
it frankly incredible. Such non-philosophers as are acquainted 
with it also find it hard to believe. This, however, as I am well 
aware, is not an argument against the theory, except in so far 
as we are prepared to give weight to Aristotle’s dictum that the 
ethical views of common-sense people, that is to say, of non¬ 
professional philosophers, are among the most important data 
of which professional philosophers are required to take account. 
Ayer also tells us that “the philosopher has no right to despise 
the beliefs of common sense”. Yet it is hard to resist the view 
that the logical positivist doctrine of ethics flatly contradicts them. 
Perhaps Ayer would say that he does not despise the beliefs of 
common sense about ethics, but only analyses those beliefs in an 
uncommon way. Yet when one remembers that the upshot of 
his theory is to stigmatize the beliefs of common-sense people 
about ethics—as, for example, that some things are right and 
some things wrong, and that a man ought to do his duty—as 
groundless and meaningless, it is hard to credit the assurance 


THEORY OF VALUE 


125 

that the beliefs themselves are embraced and that it is only their 
common-sense analysis which is rejected. As I pointed out in an 
earlier chapter , 1 the analysis of the meaning of common-sense 
propositions which Logical Positivism offers, is rarely such as the 
common-sense man who asserts the propositions would be pre¬ 
pared to accept. How far considerations of this kind are endtled 
to rank as arguments against the theory, I am not prepared to 
say. I leave them to turn to considerations of a more formal 
type. 

(2) What is it that Ethical Judgments Express? The first derives 
from the question, what is it that ethical language is, on the 
emotive theory, supposed to express? The answer is “emotion” 
and, in particular, the emotions of approval and disapproval. 
Sometimes, however, the word “attitude” is used. The dis¬ 
tinction is, I think, significant. 

(a) Let us, first, suppose that the appropriate word is 
“emotion”. Emotions belong to the same category as feelings 
and desires, in that their occurrence is normally taken to be the 
effect of some prior psychological and/or physiological event 
which is their completely determining cause. We are not in a 
position to say that we propose either to feel or not to feel a certain 
emotion; it occurs in spite of us, nor are we responsible for its 
occurrence. Putting the point in psychological language, we may 
say that emotions, feelings and desires belong to the affective- 
conative aspect of our psyche. I suggest, then, that the words 
“likes” and “desires” and “wishes” might be used without 
inaccuracy to describe what it is that, on this interpretation 
of the theory, ethical language expresses, so that the proposition, 
“this is good” will express a feeling of liking for “this” or, alter¬ 
natively, a “wish” or “desire” for “this”; or, perhaps, a “desire” 
for more of “this”. If this be the correct interpretation of the 
meaning of the phrase,«'“emotion of approval”, the question 
must be asked, is it a feeling or desire of this kind that the propo¬ 
sition, “this is good”, or “this is right” does, in fact, express? 
Answer, it obviously is not. “This is good”, “this is right”, “this 
is my duty” are obviously not just expressions of the feeling which 
would normally be expressed by some such phrase as “I happen 
to like this”. On the contrary, many writers have noted as a 
distinguishing mark of courses of conduct which are right and 
1 See ch. I, pp. 22-25. 


126 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

of actions which are “my duty” the characteristic of being 
precisely what I don’t like. They have even implied that, if 
I did like a particular course of conduct, it could not be my 
duty. However this may be, the opposition between desire and 
duty, “this is what I want to do” and “this is what I ought to 
do” is sufficiently familiar and sufficiently marked to make it 
reasonably certain that the emotion of approval which an 
ethical judgment expresses is not equivalent to a liking or a 
wishing or a desiring. 

(, b ) Now, let us suppose that the emotion of approval ex¬ 
pressed by ethical judgments is not a mere feeling or desire, but 
is more akin to an attitude. “Attitude” is a vague word, but 
most of us would, I think, differentiate it from feeling and desire 
by including in it an element of will, and, more particularly, 
of rational will. “His attitude to strong drink or to foreigners 
is one of disapproval”, means that he holds strong drink or 
foreigners to be objectively undesirable, and not only wishes 
them to be diminished, but will do his best to diminish them 
or at least to keep them at arm’s length from himself. Now, 
if elements of reason and will are included as constituents in 
the concept denoted by the word “attitude”, it is clear that an 
“attitude” is a very different thing from a mere feeling or desire. 

Wherein does the difference lie? First, I suggest, in the inclu¬ 
sion within the concept of attitude of the apprehension of an 
objective situation. This apprehension is both cognitive and 
normative; it purports, in other words, to inform us not only of 
the existence, but of the desirability or undesirability of some¬ 
thing other than ourselves; feelings on the contrary give us no 
information except about ourselves. 

Secondly, attitude includes an element of will. One wills a 
particular line of conduct relatively to an apprehended situa¬ 
tion. Thus, one apprehends rationally that justice, in the sense 
of fairness of distribution, is desirable and then wills not to take 
more than one’s fair share of a dish of asparagus however 
badly one may want to do so. This factor of voluntary inhi¬ 
bition or restraint in personal, becomes in social relations a 
factor of compulsion. Thus, we apprehend rationally that it 
is undesirable to take human life in anger or resentment and 
make a law forbidding citizens to carry firearms. In general, 
we conclude that it is rational to desire (or to deplore) a 
certain state of affairs and then will to bring about (or to 


THEORY OF VALUE 127 

diminish) the state of affairs whose general character we ration¬ 
ally apprehend. 

I am not, of course, suggesting that this is a complete analysis 
of the moral situation, or that it covers all the ground. My pur¬ 
pose is only to point out, (i) that reason and will in the sense 
illustrated are present in most ethical judgments; (ii) that most 
people would agree that they are so present; what is more, they 
give evidence of their agreement by making use of the expres¬ 
sions containing the word “right” which so frequently charac¬ 
terize pronouncements about ethics; and (iii) that the presence 
of the factors of reason and will sharply differentiates the content 
of that which an ethical judgment expresses from the content of 
pure feeling, expressed by such exclamations as “delicious 
strawberries!”, or by a mere ejaculation such as “God! How it 
hurts”. Before leaving the question of language, I would add 
that it is not by the word “feeling” that the experiences which 
ethical judgments express are adequately denoted, but by some 
such word as “attitude”. 

These, as it seems to me, important and necessary dis¬ 
tinctions are blurred by an omnibus definition of all ethical 
judgments as expressions or ejaculations of emotion, and the 
differences in attitude which distinguish judgments expressive 
of feeling from judgments which convey what are at least in 
part the deliverances of reason and will are overlooked. 

(3) The Origin and Distinctive Use of Ethical Terms. According 
to the emotive theory of ethics, ethical judgments are ejacula¬ 
tions of the judger’s feelings of approval or disapproval, so that 
the word “wrong” in the sentence, “stealing is wrong”, adds 
nothing to the meaning of the sentence. If we ask how we come 
to feel emotions of approval for conduct X and of disapproval 
for conduct Y, the answer falls, as we have seen, 1 within the 
provinces of the psychologist, the sociologist and the anthro¬ 
pologist. Broadly, their answer is that we feel approval for 
actions which we think will benefit us or our social group, and 
disapproval for actions which we think will harm us or our 
social group—this, at least, is an example of the type of answer 
that psychology and sociology give. (There are many variants 
of the type, as, for example, that we are conditioned to feel 
approval of conduct which will benefit the governing class of our 
1 See p. 109. 


128 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

social group.) These answers are, of course, up to a point 
correct. They are correct in the sense that they explain to a 
large extent why it is that we apply the terms “right” and 
“wrong” to the conduct to which we do, in fact, apply them. 
But the reason why we call X right is not the same as what we 
mean when we say that it is right. Now, either the word “right” 
carries some specific meaning not co-terminous with “conducive 
to the advantage of self or group” or “felicific in respect of self 
or group”, or it does not. If it does not, if its meaning is ex¬ 
hausted by the concepts of happiness and advantage, if, in other 
words, to say “X is right”, is to make an ejaculation of emo¬ 
tional approval for what is thought to conduce to advantage 
or to promote happiness, why use the word, “right” at all? 
Why not speak directly of happiness and advantage, as we do 
when we make judgments which express feelings of pleasure or 
adduce considerations of self-interest. I disapprove of toothache 
and, when the dentist hurts me, I make an ejaculation of pain; 
but it never occurs to me to say that toothache is wrong , or 
that the dentist is wicked. If on the other hand “right” does have 
a specific meaning, what can it be but an ethical meaning which 
is not wholly analysable into considerations of advantage or 
happiness? What I am here suggesting is that the logical 
positivist view fails to account both for the origin and for the 
distinctive use of ethical terms. Even if this apparently dis¬ 
tinctive meaning is illusory and ethical concepts are figments 
which stand for nothing, why was it necessary to invent them? 
It is noticeable that we do not feel constrained to invent dis¬ 
tinctive terms to express others of our feelings of approval and 
disapproval. I disapprove of cruelty, but I also disapprove of 
toothache and dislike spinach. But while I say “cruelty is 
wrong”, I don’t say, “toothache is wrong”. I say, “you did 
wrong to torture that child for your own pleasure”, but I 
don’t say, “you did wrong to eat that spinach for your lunch”. 
Why the difference, if the analysis of the propositions “cruelty 
is wrong” “toothache is painful” and “spinach is beastly” is 
the same? If all three propositions merely express a feeling and 
do not, therefore, as Ayer puts it, “come under the category of 
truth and falsehood”, why do I go out of my way to translate 
one of them and one only into what is prima facie quite a 
different proposition, namely, “cruelty is wrong”? According to 
Ayer, “cruelty to children is wrong”, is equivalent to “hurting 


THEORY OF VALUE 


129 

children!!’ 5 , that is to say, it is an ejaculation of horror. 
Similarly, “toothache is painful”, or “spinach is distasteful” is, 
I suppose, equivalent to “horrible toothache!!”, “beastly 
spinach!! ” But if this is so, why do we moralize our disapproval 
of cruelty but not our disapproval of toothache and spinach? If 
it be said that “toothache is painful” and “spinach is beastly” 
are genuine factual propositions, in that they describe a quality 
of intrinsic painfulness belonging to toothache and a quality 
of intrinsic distastefulness belonging to spinach, why, one 
wonders, is not “cruelty is wrong” also accorded the status of a 
genuine factual proposition? 

If, finally, it be said that the true analysis of “toothache is 
painful” and “spinach is beastly” is, “I experience a feeling of 
pain when I have toothache” and “I experience a feeling of 
dislike when I eat spinach”, then the same analysis should be 
given to “cruelty is wrong”. But to analyse the meaning of the 
statement “cruelty is wrong” as “I experience a feeling of dis¬ 
approval when I come across cruelty”, is equivalent to making 
the statement assert rather than express a feeling, and is, there¬ 
fore, indistinguishable from the subjectivist position (A) which 
Ayer repudiates. 

To sum up, there are three main alternative analyses of the 
propositions, “toothache is painful” and “spinach is beastly”. 

(i) The objectivist. According to this view the propositions 
refer to intrinsic features belonging respectively to toothache and 
spinach. If this is their correct analysis, why should not a 
similar analysis be accorded to “cruelty is wrong”. 

(ii) The subjectivist. According to this view the propositions 
assert that the speaker is experiencing such and such feelings. 
If the view is correct, why should the subjectivist analysis be 
repudiated in its application to “cruelty is wrong”? 

(iii) The emotive. According to this view the propositions 
merely express the speaker’s feelings and are not, therefore, 
genuine propositions at all. If this is the correct analysis, why 
do we go out of our way to invent the word, “wrong” and pass 
what appears primafacie to be an ethical judgment in the case of 
cruelty, but not in the case of toothache and spinach? 

Now, let us take an example of moral approval. We approve 
of many things, of hot baths when we are cold and wet, of 
turkey and plum pudding, of generosity and of scrupulousness 
in the matter of repaying debts. In the case of the first pair of 

5 


I 30 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

these objects of approval, we are content to say that we enjoy 
or like them; in the case of the second pair, we pass ethical 
judgments and say, in regard to the first, that it is a virtue and 
ought, therefore, to be cultivated, and in regard to the second, 
that it is a duty and ought, therefore, to be performed. Now, the 
question is, why, if Ayer’s analysis of ethical judgments is 
correct, do we go out of our way to construct a meaningless 
array of ethical terms and notions with which to deceive our¬ 
selves as to the real meaning of what we are saying in the case 
of the second pair of judgments, but not in the case of the 
first pair? “Hot baths are good” may mean (i) hot baths are 
intrinsically desirable. If so, why is not this the true analysis of 
“honesty is good”? Or it may mean (ii) “I like” or “I approve 
of hot baths”. 

If so, why is not the subjectivist analysis, which Ayer re¬ 
pudiates, the correct analysis of “honesty is good”? Or it may 
mean (iii) “Hot baths; good show!! 55 If so, if the proposition is 
only an ejaculation of a feeling of approval—and this, I imagine, 
is Ayer’s view—why does a similar ejaculation of approval in 
regard to cases of honesty and generosity lead us to invent and 
apply the ethical notions of “ought”, “right” and “duty”? 

Again, I approve of Shakespeare’s sonnets and Mozart’s 
quartets. These feelings of approval I qualify by the epithet, 
“aesthetic”. Aesthetic feelings are those commonly supposed 
to be aroused in us by what is beautiful, and I, accordingly, 
proceed to assert that Mozart’s quartets and Shakespeare’s 
sonnets are beautiful, attributing to them a certain quality or 
characteristic to which the emotions of approval aroused in 
me are a response. Upon this foundation a formidable structure 
of aesthetic criticism and evaluation has been raised. 

On Ayer’s view to say, “Mozart’s quartets are beautiful”, is 
not even to assert that one has a feeling, or to describe it; it is 
merely to express it. But if to say “Generosity is noble” or 
“Honesty is a virtue and ought to be cultivated”, is to ejaculate 
one’s emotions of admiring approval for generosity and 
honesty, and to say “Mozart’s G minor quintet is a work of 
exceptional beauty and ought to be valued”, is to ejaculate 
one’s emotion of admiring approval for Mozart, how is it that 
ethics has come to be so sharply distinguished from aesthetics? 
If, in short, ethical and aesthetic judgments are alike expressions 
of feeling, why do we distinguish what is good from what is 


THEORY OF VALUE 


131 

beautiful and erect such different structures of judgment and 
criticism to accommodate and evaluate the experiences to which 
we give the name of ethical and aesthetic? No act of rational 
judgment, no appreciation of worth enters, on Ayer’s view, 
into our aesthetic and ethical judgments, nor could it do so, 
since there are no ethical and aesthetic qualities to appraise 
and to judge. Such conceptions as that of a good musical ear 
which is capable of development or a sense of plastic form that 
experience can refine and practice cultivate are meaningless, 
for such conceptions imply worth, discrimination, the ability 
to distinguish the good from the bad and an impassioned 
seeking after the good. 

To put the point in another way, the content of judgments 
of value in the spheres of aesthetics and ethics, is, for Ayer 
composed exclusively of the feelings which they express. Now, 
one man’s feelings are as good, in the sense of being as truly 
felt, as another’s. What, indeed, could it mean to say that one 
man’s feelings were better than another’s, on Ayer’s, or indeed, 
on any view? 

My criticism of this position may be put in the form of a 
dilemma. If Ayer’s account is right, why, I ask, have ethics 
and aesthetics been singled out as separate branches of study 
and enquiry with their own vocabularies of special terms and 
apparently rational critiques and how did they come to be 
differentiated one from the other? Ayer, I suppose, might 
answer that the feelings of approval which ethical judgments 
express are qualitatively differentiated from those which 
aesthetic judgments express. For example, his analysis of the 
statement, “this action is wrong”, is that the speaker “is simply 
evincing moral ” (my italics) “disapproval of it”. Again, he 
speaks of “a special sort of moral disapproval”. But—and here 
the dilemma presents itself—either the word, “moral” as here 
used, stands for some specific, some uniquely differentiating 
quality of disapproval, or it does not. If it does not, my 
previous question stands. If, however, it does stand for such a 
differentiating quality, the attempt to analyse the content of 
ethics into considerations of happiness, expediency and fear 
must be mistaken. Why moral approval and disapproval, if 
there is no uniquely moral factor in the universe to be at once 
the source and the object of the moral feelings which are our 
response to it. 


132 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

My criticism may be summarized as follows. If the word 
“moral” stands for nothing, then we cannot understand how 
ethical judgments came to be formulated and to be differen¬ 
tiated from aesthetic judgments. If it stands for something, 
something that is both specific and unique, then Ayer’s theory 
fails wholly to explain how and why it came to do so, since it 
denies the presence in the universe of any factor which is at 
once objective and unique to which the judgment could refer 
and to which the feeling which the judgment expresses could 
serve as a response. 

(4) Interpretation of the Organism in Terms of Response to En¬ 
vironment. I have already pointed out that Logical Positivism 
has a decided materialist bias. When its peculiar phraseology 
is translated into more familiar terms, we find that it repre¬ 
sents the mind as being very largely, if not wholly determined 
by the body, and the body as a member of the natural order 
which develops within an environment to which it responds. 
It is in terms of its responses to its environment that the be¬ 
haviour of the body is to be interpreted. As the inheritor of 
hundreds of years of behaviour and development in response 
to the stimuli reaching it from its environment, it is only to be 
expected that the contemporary human body should bear the 
marks of its evolution plainly upon it. And not only the body; 
for the mind or psyche, if I may permit myself to use such an 
old-fashioned expression, is also, on this view, conditioned by 
its environment either directly, if we concede that there may be 
mental events which are not merely epiphenomenal upon 
preceding bodily events, or indirectly via conditioning by the 
body. When the bodies and minds of the members of a bio¬ 
logical species have been exposed for hundreds of thousands 
of years to the influence of an environment which throughout 
the whole of that period has played unremittingly upon them, 
it is only reasonable, on materialist premises, to expect that 
their characteristics both physical and mental should be such 
as the environment would be calculated to produce. These 
characteristics, then, are to be regarded as responses to 
features in the environment which over a large number of 
generations have conditioned them. 

Among the characteristics exhibited by most, perhaps all, 
human organisms are religious need and the capacity for 


THEORY OF VALUE 


133 

moral judgment. It is customary on the part of both sub¬ 
jectivists and logical positivists to regard these characteristics 
as purely subjective, as owning, that is to say, no objective 
counterpart in the external world. Religious need is a product 
of man’s consciousness of his loneliness and helplessness in an 
alien and indifferent universe. To reassure its helplessness and 
to comfort its loneliness, the human mind invents figures of 
power and consolation, projects them on to the canvas of a 
meaningless universe and then proceeds to acclaim and wor¬ 
ship the creatures of its own imagination. Moral judgments are 
analysed on similar lines as rationalizations of impulses to 
approve and disapprove, whose origins are grounded in 
utility. This account of the origin of moral judgments renders 
plausible the logical positivist interpretation of them as mere 
ejaculations of approval and disapproval. 

Now, granted the materialist bias to which I have referred, 
we cannot, I suggest, write off these widespread, these almost 
universal attributes of the human mind, as if they were merely 
arbitrary. If the mind is not creative, if free-will is a meaning¬ 
less conception, the mind cannot, it is obvious, develop any 
characteristics as a consequence of its own unstimulated 
initiative. The source and explanation of the characteristics 
which it obviously exhibits must, then, be sought elsewhere in 
the influence of factors in its environment. It is as responses 
to and effects of the influence of these factors that the character¬ 
istics must be regarded, since, rightly regarded, they are only 
the end products of a series of causes originating in the factors. 
It follows that religious need and the capacity for moral judg¬ 
ment must also be regarded as the end products of external 
causal influences, being the responses of the human organism 
to factors in its environment which in the course of evolution 
has produced them. 

Now, it is hard to see how a moral or a religious judgment 
can have grown up in response to the influence of an environ¬ 
ment which was destitute of moral and religious factors. 
Hence, if I am right, we cannot treat the deliverances of the 
moral and religious consciousness as arbitrary, as merely sub¬ 
jective or as mere expressions of feeling. They are indications 
of the fact that the universe contains a moral and religious 
order. The same argument could be used mutatis mutandis to 
show that it contains an aesthetic order. Once again, it is, I 


134 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

suggest, only the arbitrary limitation of the concept of experi¬ 
ence, to sensory experience which prevents logical positivists 
from according unbiased consideration to what is prima facie 
such an obvious interpretation of the moral and the religious 
consciousness. 

Unanimity of Moral Judgments 

It is, I submit, only on some such supposition as the fore¬ 
going that we shall find ourselves able to account for the high 
degree of unanimity that characterizes moral and aesthetic 
judgments. Much is made of the divergences between the moral 
and aesthetic judgments passed by different peoples and in 
different ages. While I do not wish to minimize these, I think 
that too much has been made of them. Peoples who have 
murdered their parents and exposed their children have, no 
doubt, been able to sustain themselves with their own and the 
community’s approval, but for the murdering and the exposure 
it has always been possible to adduce some special reason, as 
for example, the conservation of inadequate food supplies, or 
the facilitation of migratory movements by nomadic tribes, or 
the equalization of the sexes. But nobody has thought it 
necessary to produce a special reason for not murdering parents 
or exposing children. In short, while a special reason is always 
required for morally repugnant conduct, in the absence of some 
special circumstance the morally unobjectionable course is 
naturally taken; if it is not taken, moral reprobation is incurred. 
Similarly, though people are often cruel and on occasion cruel 
because of the disinterested pleasure that they take in cruelty, 
nobody is found to argue that cruelty is better than kindness, 
or that cruelty ought to be practised on merits. Again, though 
we may differ widely about the merits of a particular piece of 
music and are familiar with the contempt which one age so 
often feels for the masterpieces of the last, nobody, so far as I 
am aware, has ever been found to maintain that a chorus of 
cats is better art, or is even a more agreeable noise, than a 
symphony. 

If it be conceded that there is a wide measure of agreement 
in regard to moral and aesthetic judgments, the fact can, I 
suggest, be most readily accounted for on the supposition that 
the universe contains moral and aesthetic values, that these 
stand in a special relation to the subjects of ethical and aesthetic 


THEORY OF VALUE 


135 

valuation, that is to say, to conduct and to art, that the mind 
of man takes note of and responds to this relation, that moral 
and aesthetic experiences are the forms which its responses 
take and moral and aesthetic judgments the way in which 
they are expressed. 

At this point the argument passes naturally from criticism 
of the emotive theory to the constructive statement of an 
alternative view. 

(C) OBJECTIVE THEORIES OF VALUE 

By ethical objectivism I mean among other things the view 
that the universe contains an objective moral order which 
subsists independently of our awareness of it, that when I do 
my duty, I subject myself to this order and obey the law which 
it prescribes, which law is independent of my likings and dis- 
likings, and that a morally good action is invested with a value 
which is different from and superior to the value which 
attaches to the satisfaction of my pleasures and to the gratifica¬ 
tion of my hates. 

It is entailed by this view that judgments of ethical value are 
unique, in the sense that they cannot be exhaustively resolved 
or translated into any other kind of judgment, and unanalys¬ 
able, in the sense that no allegedly complete analysis of them 
can be given which does not falsify them. 

Ayer does full justice to these characteristics, “the validity 
of ethical judgments”, he writes, . . must be regarded as 
‘absolute 5 or ‘intrinsic 5 and not empirically calculable 55 . 
“Statements of value 55 , he adds, “are not controlled by observa¬ 
tion as ordinary empirical propositions are. 55 It is, indeed, 
precisely because they are not empirically verifiable that he 
deduces that they are not propositions at all but are only 
expressions of emotion. 

I have tried to show that in taking this line he draws a false 
conclusion from a true premise. The true premise is that 
ethical judgments are objective, unique and unanalysable, or, 
as he phrases it, “absolute 55 and “intrinsic 55 ; the false con¬ 
clusion is that, therefore, they are only expressions of feeling. 
In drawing this conclusion Ayer, as I have tried to show, has 
been misled by his refusal to recognize that a factual state¬ 
ment can have meaning, even if it is not verifiable in sensory 
experience. 


136 


A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 


This is not the place in which to develop an objectivist 
view of ethics. I confine myself, therefore, to a statement of 
what I take to be its essential features in order that its differ¬ 
ences from the subjectivist and emotive views may be clearly 
seen. 

Statement of Objectivism 

I begin with logic. An objectivist view, as I understand it, 
maintains that in logic there are certain first principles, the 
premises, which are ultimate in the sense that they are not 
deducible from other principles. It maintains, further, that 
there must be such principles, since all thought must start 
from some premise, and this premise if it really is the starting 
point, cannot follow from any prior premise. An objectivist 
view would hold that the principles of reasoning as ex¬ 
emplified, for example, in inference both deductive and 
inductive, are “first” in this sense, since any reasoned attempt 
to establish them since it would need to make use of inference, 
would be obliged to assume them. 

What Aristotle called the first principles of the sciences, 
are also “first” or ultimate in this sense. If they cannot be 


verified by observation, for they are not sensory, or demon¬ 
strated by reason, since reasoning must assume them, how are 
they known? Aristotle’s answer, which I take to be correct, is 
by a direct act of rational insight, exercised by a faculty of 
intellectual inspection or intuition which he called voos. 
Intellectual inspection is immediate and revelatory; it reveals 
to us the nature of something other than ourselves, and it does 
so directly without the mediation of the interpretative reason. 
In respect of its immediacy it is like sensation; it is unlike it, 
in being a revelation, not of a sensory but of a non-sensory 
order of reality. 

In addition to the first principles of reasoning, the faculty of 
intellectual intuition or inspection with varying degrees of 
clarity also reveals to us values. Of these, two sets immediately 
concern us; those of ethics and those of aesthetics. These are 
like the first principles of reasoning in being ultimate. But they 
are ultimate in a different sense. The principles of reasoning 
are ultimate in the sense of being first; all thought derives from 
and depends upon them. The values are ultimate in the sense 
of being last; all those things which men deem to be desirable 



THEORY OF VALUE 


137 

or valuable are desired or valued for the sake of them. Just as 
in the case of thinking it is obvious that there must be certain 
principles of reason which reason does not establish, so in the 
case of values, there must be some things which are desired for 
their own sakes as ends and not for the sake of anything else. 
We desire A for the sake of B, B for the sake of G, G for the sake 
of D, and so on; but, it is obvious, the process must stop some¬ 
where and the point at which it stops, whether we declare that 
point to be happiness, moral virtue, beauty, harmony, health 
or whatever other end may be propounded as ultimate, is the 
point at which we reach some end that we desire for its own 
sake. In saying that something is desired for its own sake, we 
are saying also that we can give no reason why it should be 
thought desirable, for any such reason would take the form of 
specifying some other end for the sake of which it was desired, 
and if there were some other end to which it was desired as a 
means, then it would not be ultimate. Thus, we may say that 
we desire fresh air for the sake of health and health for that of 
happiness; but we are unable to say why we find happiness 
desirable. 

It is also clear that the values cannot be measured, for 
measurement implies the existence of an objective yard-stick 
or measuring rod, which must be logically prior to that which 
it measures, since to say that A is longer or hotter than B is 
to invoke a scale of measurement which is logically prior to 
A and B. Finally, the values cannot be empirically verified 
since they are not sensory. 

These are familiar considerations and Ayer makes full 
acknowledgment of them. He says that “argument is possible 
on moral questions only if some system of values is pre¬ 
supposed”. But, he goes on, “what we do not and cannot 
argue about is the validity of these moral principles”. Since 
he denies the existence of moral principles, he is driven to 
conclude that no argument is possible about moral questions. 
He points out that what often seem prima facie to be arguments 
about moral questions turn out on analysis to be arguments 
about questions of fact. Thus, when we engage in a dispute 
about what appears to be a question of ethical values, “we 
argue that” our opponent “has misconceived the agent’s 
motive; or that he has misjudged the effects of the action, or 
its probable effects in view of the agent’s knowledge; or that 


138 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

he has failed to take into account the special circumstances in 
which the agent was placed. Or else we employ more general 
arguments about the effects which actions of a certain type 
tend to produce, or the qualities which are usually manifested 
in their performance.” Ayer concludes that since we cannot 
argue about moral principles or ethical values, for there are 
no such things, ethical judgments belong to the sphere of 
feeling. 

On examination this conclusion is seen to rest upon two 
main grounds: (1) the first, is that value judgments are 
irrational; (2) the second, that they cannot be verified, that 
is to say, measured and tested with a view to establishing their 
accuracy. 

(1) The Alleged Irrationality of Value Judgments 

This charge rests, I suggest, upon a mistaken view of what 
it is to be rational. I referred above to our knowledge of the 
principles upon which all reasoning depends, the principles 
which Aristotle called the first principles of the sciences. 
These, I pointed out, cannot themselves be demonstrated by 
reasoning; they are seen to be valid by a faculty of intellectual 
intuition which is both immediate and revelatory. I ventured 
to make this point for two reasons: first, nobody supposes that 
this “scandal”, if I may so term it, about their origins invali¬ 
dates the logical processes of reasoning, destroys the validity 
of argument or impugns the conclusions of science. Secondly, 
there is, as I have also tried to show, a close resemblance 
between our apprehension of the first principles of reasoning 
and the values which give meaning to our moral and aesthetic 
judgments. If we are not justified in pronouncing the former to 
be irrational merely because they are undemonstrated, why 
should the latter be pronounced irrational because they are 
undemonstrated? If the former are revealed to a faculty of 
intellectual intuition, why not the latter? For example, just as 
in the case of the first principles it may be self-evident that 
their subjects and their predicates are necessarily connected, 
so it may be immediately apparent in the case of a particular 
action that there is a necessary connexion between it and the 
concept of right or duty. 

I am not here concerned to argue in favour of this conclusion. 
It is enough for my purpose to point out that Logical Positivism 


THEORY OF VALUE 


139 

is precluded by dogma from entertaining it. The dogma in 
question is that which refuses to recognize any kind of ex¬ 
perience as relevant to verification and, therefore, to the 
establishment of meaning except sensory experience. Arbi¬ 
trarily delimit the meaning of meaning, confine meaning to 
sense-experience, and you are thereby committed either to 
denying the deliverances of uou? or declaring them to be 
meaningless. As a consequence you will be led to deny the 
faculty of rational insight into the nature of things, and in deny¬ 
ing the faculty, to deny also that our experience of ethics and 
religion can be significant. And if it be asked why we should 
suppose that there is significance in our intuitions of religious 
and moral value, and why they should be treated as falling out¬ 
side the category of mere feeling, the answer, I suggest, is to be 
found in the considerations adduced above to show that ethical 
judgments are recognized as claiming an authority and a 
publicity that feeling judgments do not. We expect other 
people to share our ethical judgments and feel that they are 
morally obtuse if they do not, and we expect ourselves and 
others to act in accordance with their dictates and feel that we 
and they are wrong if we do not. Now, we do not entertain any 
similar convictions and expectations in regard to the deliver¬ 
ance of our judgments of feeling. It is hardly necessary to add 
that the validity of these considerations is perfectly compatible 
with the view that any particular ethical judgment may be 
mistaken. 

(2) Their Non-verifiability 

It is often urged against ethical and aesthetic judgments 
that they are not verifiable. If by “verifiable” is meant, veri¬ 
fiable in the sense that scientific judgments are verifiable, that 
is to say, by the tests of observation and experiment, this is 
true. If I say, “this is higher or hotter than that”, instruments 
exist by which my statement can be tested and shown to be 
either true or false. But there are no comparable instruments for 
testing the statements, “this is better” or “more beautiful” 
than that. 

I have two comments: (i) The fact that I have no certain 
means of determining whether the statement, “X is better” 
or “more beautiful than Y” is true or not, is not in itself a 
reason for supposing that it is not true, still less for contending 


I40 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

that it is meaningless to say either that it is true or that it is 
not true. 

(ii) Secondly, it is, once again, only the restriction of ex¬ 
perience to sensory experience which gives rise to the view 
that judgments of ethical and aesthetic worth cannot be verified. 
If the occurrence of certain sense-contents which, incidentally, 
on Ayer’s view, are private, verifies an empirical statement, why 
should not the occurrence of certain moral intuitions verify an 
ethical statement? 

Nor in the case of ethical and aesthetic statements is it 
certain that verification, in the sense of verification which logical 
positivists are prepared to accept, will always be lacking. 
Consider in this connexion the analogy suggested by the 
development of science. 

The Greeks had a craving for scientific explanation. To 
satisfy it, they put forward theories of the nature of the material 
world, for example, the atomic theory advanced by Leucippus 
and Democritus, or the evolutionary theory of the origin of 
man suggested by Anaximander which, though they belong 
to the category of intuitions or, if the phrase be preferred, 
intellectual guesses, turned out to be inspired intuitions, 
approximating in some cases with considerable accuracy to 
the conclusions which physics and biology were subsequently 
to draw on the basis of laboriously collected evidence. But the 
intuitions of the Greeks had to await the invention of the 
appropriate instruments of observation and verification before 
they could be tested and with modifications adopted. The 
delay was a long one, extending over many hundreds of years. 

Men also have a craving for righteousness and a feeling for 
beauty. The conceptions of the nature of the universe which 
the intuitions of the good and the beautiful lead them to 
formulate cannot be substantiated, at any rate in this order 
or at this level of existence. But this fact does not mean that 
they will remain permanently unsubstantiated, any more than 
the intuitive responses which the Greek mind made to the 
impact upon it of its physical environment were to remain 
permanently unsubstantiated. It is at least possible—many 
have held it to be probable—that they may be verified in the 
logical positivist sense of verification by a direct experience of 
the moral and aesthetic order of the universe enjoyed by the 
human spirit in another order of existence, so that, just as the 


THEORY OF VALUE 


141 

unverified theories put forward by the Greeks to satisfy their 
craving for explanation in regard to natural facts turned out 
to be surprisingly accurate when the appropriate conditions 
for testing them had been established, so, too, the theories 
which, under the stimulus of the craving to explain the signi¬ 
ficance of moral and aesthetic experience, we put forward in 
regard to moral and aesthetic values, may turn out to be not 
wholly beside the mark when the appropriate conditions 
occur for testing them. But it may well be that these conditions 
will not be satisfied in this order of existence. 

A similar consideration suggests itself in the case of history. 
A history, as I have pointed out in another connexion, 1 can 
never be completely comprehensive if only because the writer 
must select his facts. Now every process of selection involves a 
“weighing” of facts. Historians select one fact as significant 
and omit others as trivial and unimportant, and, in so doing, 
they inevitably act upon pre-conceived views as to what is 
important, what trivial. But the fact that all historical writing 
is to this extent and in this sense subjective, does not mean 
that there are no facts for the historian to record. And just as 
the writing of history reflects a point of view and expresses a 
faith, so the moral and aesthetic judgments that we pass are 
conditioned by an outlook and express a conviction, the con¬ 
viction, namely, of the presence in the universe of absolute 
standards by reference to which some actions are shown to be 
better, some works of art more valuable than others. Admittedly 
in our present order of existence such a view of the universe 
must remain a matter of faith, but the faith can meanwhile be 
confirmed by the coherence and comprehensiveness of the con¬ 
clusions to which it points, by, in short, its application to all 
departments of experience. 

For my part, I cannot see that our inability to make what 
can be shown to be accurate ethical and aesthetic judgments, 
our inability to evaluate with certainty the ethical and aesthetic 
characteristics of certain situations, or our inability to be cer¬ 
tain in respect of any judgment or assessment whether it is 
correct or not, constitute reasons for supposing that there are 
no aesthetic characteristics to judge or ethical situations to 
evaluate. Why, after all, should we expect to be able to judge 
and evaluate all things to a nicety? 

1 See ch. Ill, pp. 58, 59. 


142 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

Aristotle tells us that “it is the mark of an educated mind to 
expect that amount of exactitude in each kind which the nature 
of the particular subject admits”. This is sound advice. Accept¬ 
ing it, we shall do well to bear in mind that the first concern 
of a philosopher is to ensure, so far as in him lies, the adequacy 
of his philosophy of the whole of experience. This requirement 
is not met by the ruling out of significant areas of knowledge 
and experience, in the interests of an arbitrarily limited con¬ 
ception of meaning, or an arbitrarily defined standard of 
clarity. 


CHAPTER IX 


THE EFFECTS OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

That Logical Positivism has No Effects 

As I pointed out in the Introduction, it is customary to say 
that the adoption of a logical positivist point of view in philo¬ 
sophy has no effects outside philosophy. Certainly, it is said, it 
has no political effects, such as, for example, the promotion of a 
state of mind favourable to the growth of Fascism. In this respect 
Logical Positivism is compared with Radical Empiricism of 
which, indeed, it is at once a re-statement and a development. 
Like Radical Empiricism it dispenses with a priori knowledge, 
repudiates the notion of necessary connexion, eschews absolutes 
and denies metaphysics, while presenting factual statements 
about the empirical world as hypotheses. 

The climate of opinion fostered by Logical Positivism is, 
therefore, it is claimed, unfavourable to authoritarianism in all 
its forms. It destroys the basis of the supernatural authority 
claimed for the Church, no less than of the mystical authority 
sometimes claimed for the State. It is also inimical to dogmatic 
views in regard to ethics and aesthetics, since it excises those 
absolute values upon a supposed knowledge of which dogmatic 
ethics and ex cathedra pronouncements about aesthetics have 
usually been based, and is favourable to an open cast of mind 
which is ready and eager to accept and judge all things on 
merits. Such a cast of mind, in so far as it expresses itself in any 
distinctive political or ethical trends, is associated with a liberal 
reformism in politics and a secular humanitarianism in ethics. 
It is the foe of every form of fanaticism, and intolerance and 
dogma are foreign to its temper. The examples of Hume and 
J. S. Mill are frequently cited as illustrating this cast of mind. 
Hume was a Laodicean in politics, while Mill’s radical reform¬ 
ism stopped short only of revolution. Of no great thinkers, it is 
said, are the writings less congenial to an authoritarian attitude 
to ethics or a fascist attitude to politics. 

Now, it is, I think, true that the radical empiricist strain in 
M3 


144 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

English philosophy has been liberal and anti-authoritarian, nor 
is it difficult to see why this should have been so. Authority 
rests upon belief and most of the beliefs that have stirred men’s 
minds have had, or have professed to have, metaphysical founda¬ 
tions. Destroy the foundations and you increase the difficulty 
of believing in the existence of any order of reality other than 
that which science studies. Thus you will tend to believe in 
objective physical facts, but not in objective laws which the 
facts obey; in a natural world, but not in a Creator who made 
it; in the individual, but not in a body politic which is more 
than the sum total of the individuals who compose it. It is, 
indeed, hard to see how any mind which was seriously affected 
by logical positivist modes of thought could accept the Hegelian 
notion of the State as a super-person, or even the fascist concept 
of the nation equipped with its apparatus of sacred missions and 
divine destinies and pregnant with its historically fated role 
upon the stage of history. As Ayer himself has pointed out, 
“Fascists have hitherto tended to favour some form of metaphy¬ 
sics and they have been hostile to positivist ideas in so far as they 
were aware of them at all.” 

All this, I think, is true. Nevertheless there are important, 
countervailing considerations which suggest that the spread of 
logical positivist modes of thought may well tend to the erosion 
of desirable and to the growth of undesirable beliefs. I propose 
to mention four such considerations and to indicate the kind of 
beliefs to which they are liable to give rise. 

Considerations Tending to the Erosion of Desirable Beliefs 

{A) If you destroy the grounds for believing in an objective 
order of value, you will hold that those who have, in fact, 
believed in it, have been mistaken and that their beliefs have 
been irrational. Among these beliefs are (i) that some human 
characters and some courses of action are really better than 
others; (ii) that good cannot be equated with what any person or 
body of persons happens to approve of; and (iii) that our duty 
ought to be performed however disagreeable it may happen to 
be. If you hold that these beliefs are irrational, you are less likely 
to do your duty, if it is disagreeable, and more likely to equate 
good with what you happen to desire. As for moral scruples, 
they will tend to be dismissed as survivals from a guilt-ridden 
childhood, or as mere rationalizations of the impulse to blame. 


THE EFFECTS 


145 

The force of dominant purposes is also weakened. This is not 
the place for a discussion of what constitutes the good life; but 
many would, I think, agree that it includes, for most of us, the 
conception of one or more dominating purposes, in the service 
of which interests which might otherwise have been cultivated 
are eschewed and to which other aims, which might have been 
pursued, are subjugated. The sort of purposes that I have in 
mind are those that naturally arise in connexion with religion, 
with politics or in the service of mankind. They also include 
ambition and the pursuit of wealth. Or a man’s mind may be 
dominated by a preoccupying interest rather than a purpose as, 
for example, in gambling, in archaeology, or in bird watching. 
It is the pursuit of such a purpose, the cultivation of such an 
interest, whether good or bad, which invests life with significance 
and gives it zest. Yet wholeheartedly to pursue it is not easy. 
Other pursuits claim their share of attention, other interests 
break in, and it is, in general, only men who are imbued with an 
intense conviction, an overpowering ambition, or an unshake- 
able sense of worth who have been able to achieve the necessary 
suppressions and sacrifices. Without the conviction, without the 
sense of worth what Plato calls the third part of the soul is apt 
to take charge. Reject as theoretically groundless the concep¬ 
tions of objective value and intrinsic worth, and you make the 
practical efforts and restraints which are necessary, if men are 
to act as if some things are really worth while in a sense in which 
others are not, more difficult of achievement. In fact, I find it 
hard to resist the conclusion that if one really believed that the 
doctrines of Logical Positivism were true, there would be no bar 
of principle to the leading of that life which Plato called 
“democratic”—a Bohemian in art, a Laodicean in affairs, a 
sceptic in philosophy and religion, an inconstant in love and a 
dilettante in life. 

(B) A point which, I think, has been overlooked in connexion 
with the emotive theory of ethics and religion is that, to embrace 
it, is to deprive both ethics and religion of emotive significance. 
Let us suppose that the statement, “God is Love”, is not a state¬ 
ment about God, but is an expression of the emotions of love 
and reverence. Let us suppose, further, that I come to believe 
this. God, I shall now hold, is not loving or merciful; in fact, 
God is not anything at all, since He will fall under the general 
ban on metaphysics. How, then, shall I continue to feel the 


146 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

emotions of love and reverence for that which I now believe 
to be non-existent? To put the point in another way, if I believe 
that the statement “God is Love” is purely emotive, then it 
ceases, for me, to express emotion. 

Similarly with ethical statements. If I consistently believe 
that the statement, “stealing is wrong”, does no more than 
express an emotion of horror at stealing, it will presently cease 
to express the emotion of horror. Not to put too fine a point on 
it, I shall cease to believe that stealing is wrong. 

(C) These tendencies will be apt to operate in the spheres 
both of ethics and of religion. Logical Positivism has, however, 
another unfavourable implication which applies specifically in 
regard to religion. Let us suppose that, for whatever reason, a 
man has convinced himself that Christ performed miracles, 
that water did, in fact, become wine. Now the statement that 
water was turned into wine, even if he adopts a logical positivist 
position, will for him have meaning, since it was empirically 
verifiable. Now let us suppose that he puts the question, 
by what means was this phenomenon brought about? The 
obvious answer is that it was the consequence of Christ’s 
possession of miraculous powers, and if the further question is 
put, how did Christ come to possess these powers, the obvious 
answer, once again, is because he was, in part, a supernatural 
person. 

But the proposition that Christ was a supernatural person is 
not empirically verifiable, any more than the being in possession 
of miraculous powers was verifiable. Indeed, a supernatural 
order of reality is, I take it, only a special case of a metaphysical 
order of reality, an order, therefore, whose existence is by 
hypothesis not empirically verifiable, since empirical verification 
is possible only in regard to natural events. Hence, the super¬ 
natural order comes under the general ban on metaphysics, 
so that the statements that Christ was in part a supernatural 
person and that he was in possession of miraculous powers are 
meaningless statements. 

It follows that even if the water into wine occurrence be 
accepted as established, what I have called the obvious explana¬ 
tions of it are ruled out as meaningless. There can be no other 
explanation of what must now stand revealed as a purely 
arbitrary and inexplicable natural phenomenon. An arbitrary 
and inexplicable natural phenomenon is one which it is very 


THE EFFECTS 


147 

hard to accept; indeed, acceptance, once the supernatural 
explanation is ruled out, is pointless. Hence, even if he be pre¬ 
pared to accept the phenomena which, according to the teach¬ 
ing of the Christian religion certainly occurred, the believer is 
debarred, once he becomes a logical positivist, from according 
to them the interpretation which the Christian religion suggests. 
This is so nearly an untenable position that I find it hard to 
believe that any mind can rest in it. The obvious method of 
escape is to deny the phenomenon. My conclusion is that the 
acceptance of a logical positivist philosophy is incompatible with 
the admission of the historical character of the occurrences 
upon which the Christian faith is, in part, based. Hence, the 
professed Christian who embraces Logical Positivism presently 
finds that the implications of the philosophy which he has 
embraced are incompatible with the continued acceptance of 
the general beliefs and, in particular, of the belief in miracles, 
upon which Christianity has always insisted as essential to the 
faith. 

This is only one illustration of the way in which Logical 
Positivism is unfavourable to religious belief. 

(D) Classes and systems also disappear under the logical 
positivist ban on metaphysics. A class is not observable, nor is a 
system; we can observe only individuals. Descriptive statements 
about classes and systems are, therefore, meaningless. To quote 
a recent writer on this subject , 1 “there are” if Logical Positivism 
is right, “no mankind, no profit system, no parties, no fascism, 
no underfed people, no inadequate housing, no shoddy clothes, 
no truth and no social justice. Such being the case, there can 
be no economic problem, no political problem, no fascist 
problem, no food problem, no housing problem, no scientific 
problem and no social problem.” Mr. Dunham’s criticism is 
directed primarily at the Semanticists. His strictures would, 
nevertheless, apply mutatis mutandis to logical positivists, whom 
he charges with conjuring problems out of existence by the 
simple process of declaring them to be meaningless. If there is 
no such thing as “social justice”, there is, he declares, no valid 
ground for trying to make the world a better place. If there is no 
such thing as Fascism, in the sense of a definite and describable 
social system, then it would be impossible to identify individual 

1 Man Against Myth by Barrows Dunham (published by Frederick Muller, 
December, 1948). 


148 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

fascists “for individual fascists are fascists precisely because they 
strive to bring into existence, or to maintain in existence, that 
very system itself”. 

He concludes, “If the term ‘Fascism 5 means nothing by 
itself. . . then we can never recognize any regime as fascist.” 

This seems to me a valid comment. I object to Fascism, 
though I may like individual fascists. If there is no system, 
Fascism, or rather, if the statement, “Fascism is a political 
system”, is meaningless, then it is difficult to see what is left for 
me to object to. 

Again, if there is no objective right and wrong, if moral 
judgments are, as logical positivists hold, merely ejaculations of 
emotions of approval and disapproval, then, as Mr. Dunham 
points out, one cannot demonstrate that fascist practices are 
evil; one can only express dislike of them. “No philosophy 55 , he 
comments, “would better please the fascists themselves, since 
moral questions could then be safely left in the hands of the 
police.” 

Again, if “God exists” is a meaningless statement, it is diffi¬ 
cult to see how anybody could be induced to believe in Him. 
Mr. Dunham comments, “theologians who were long hardened 
to objections that their statements were false, were left breath¬ 
less by this new charge that they had, for the most part, been 
saying nothing at all 55 . 

Finally, if Logical Positivism is correct, you can say, “one 
atom bomb can destroy 50,000 people” (statement of fact), but 
not, “it is a bad thing to destroy 50,000 people” (statement of 
evaluation) or, rather, you can say it, but the “word ‘bad 5 adds 
nothing to the factual content of the statement”. 

Now, can anyone seriously maintain that the spread of such 
doctrines will have no consequences for ethics, politics and 
theology, or that their effect upon young and generous minds, 
protesting passionately against cruelty and injustice and eager 
to set the world to rights will not be to sap effort, discourage 
initiative, destroy the hope of change and so to assist reaction 
and sanction inertia? Gan a man really continue to feel indig¬ 
nant at cruelty, if he is convinced that the statement, “cruelty 
is wrong” is meaningless? An emotion of indignation may, 
indeed, be felt; it may even be expressed; but it will not long 
survive the conviction that it is without authority in morals or 
basis in reason. 


THE EFFECTS 


149 


Considerations Tending to the Promotion of Undesirable Beliefs 

I have adduced certain considerations tending to show that 
Logical Positivism is unfavourable to desirable beliefs. I will 
now indicate some of the reasons for thinking that it tends to 
promote undesirable beliefs. In using the words “desirable” 
and “undesirable” I am, of course, begging questions. I am 
assuming, for example, that a belief in the validity of ethics and 
religion is desirable; I am also assuming that a belief in the 
worth-whileness of Fascism and the virtues of violence is unde¬ 
sirable. I cannot defend these assumptions here. It is as well, 
however, explicitly to acknowledge that they are being made. 

If the contentions of the foregoing paragraphs be accepted, 
it follows that the effects of Logical Positivism are such as will 
be hostile to traditional beliefs. It is illogical in theory for a 
logical positivist to believe in God, in the superiority of right 
to wrong, in the intrinsic worth-whileness of particular ways 
of life and courses of conduct, in the existence of standards of 
artistic worth, and it seems illogical to believe it often seems un¬ 
necessary to practise. The first effect of the application of logical 
positivist techniques by a young man whose mind is vigorous, 
able and enquiring is to induce a thorough-going scepticism. 
The natural order has, he will conclude, no basis in a super¬ 
natural order from which it derives its meaning and its purpose. 
Values are without reality and morals without meaning. 

The result of destroying traditional beliefs is thus to produce 
a waste-land of the mind, of which T. S. Eliot’s poem is at once 
a description and, by implication, a denunciation. I say 
“denunciation” for it is hard to read the poem without deploring 
the state which it describes or deducing that the poet meant the 
reader to deplore it. But nature abhors a vacuum no less in the 
intellectual than in the physical sphere, and it is not easy for a 
young mind which is vigorous, able and enquiring to remain 
indefinitely in this state of suspended belief. Sooner or later it 
will demand nourishment in the shape of causes to uphold, 
creeds to believe, objects to revere and ends to pursue. Hence 
the popularity in our own time of such objects of reverence and 
belief as the divine State, the Party, the Race, the Volk, and 
the Fatherland. Round these various objects have crystallized 
the creeds which are at once the distinction and the disgrace of 
our age, Fascism, Communism, and Nationalism. Fascism is 
temporarily discredited but Communism and Nationalism are 


150 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

the two idols upon whose altars the youth of our civilization 
bids fair to be sacrificed. 

There are, I think, two reasons why, when traditional values 
and beliefs go by the board, those that are undesirable tend to 
take their place. The first is that if those whose business it is to 
teach the young, conveying to them such wisdom as mankind 
has acquired in the past, disown their function on the ground 
that the wisdom is no wisdom at all, but is a meaningless 
mumbo-jumbo, other teachers will take their place. The late 
Professor Collingwood has described the consequences of this 
abandonment of their function by true and its usurpation by 
false teachers better than I can hope to do: “Since one must not 
seek it from thinkers, or from ideals, or from principles, one must 
look (for guidance) to people who were not thinkers (but fools), 
to processes that were not thinking (but passion), to aims that 
were not ideals (but caprices) and to rules that were not prin¬ 
ciples (but rules of expediency). If” [philosophers] “had 
wanted to train up a generation of Englishmen and English¬ 
women expressly as the potential dupes of every adventurer in 
morals or politics, commerce or religion who would appeal to 
their emotions and promise them private gains which he neither 
could procure them nor even meant to procure them, no better 
way of doing it could have been discovered.” 

The second reason may be conveyed in the form of an analogy. 
It is a commonplace that the fallacy of Hedonism is not so 
much theoretical as practical, or is practical as well as theo¬ 
retical. The secular wisdom of mankind teaches that pleasure 
should not be pursued directly; if it is, the results, men have 
found, are almost always disappointing. For pleasure, it seems, 
is not an end but a by-product; it tends to invest activities 
directed to ends other than pleasure. Of the widespread testi¬ 
mony to this effect which has formed part of the common 
wisdom of mankind the theory of pleasure in the Tenth Book 
of Aristotle’s Ethics is the classical statement. 

This account of pleasure conveys, I think, an important 
truth. The kingdom of happiness is not to be taken by storm. 
Set out to seek happiness and it will elude you; throw yourself 
body and soul into your work; devote yourself to a cause; lift 
yourself up out of the selfish little pit of vanity and desire which 
is the self, by giving yourself to something which is greater than 
the self, and on looking back you will find that you have been 


THE EFFECTS 


151 

happy. Happiness, in short, is not a house that can be built by 
men’s hands; it is a flower that surprises you, a song which you 
hear as you pass the hedge, rising suddenly and simply into the 
night and dying down again. 

As with happiness so, I suggest, with belief. To believe some¬ 
thing because you think it to be right is rational, and if it is, 
indeed, right, salutary. To believe it, not because you think it 
to be right but because you think it right to believe something, 
right, because you are suffering from an accumulating fund of 
unexpended credence is, perhaps, natural, but it is apt to be 
unsatisfying. Like the psychological hedonist theory of pleasure, 
it puts the cart before the horse. The natural order is (a) I see 
this to be the case; therefore, ( b) I will believe it; the un¬ 
natural—the cart before the horse—is ( a ) I must believe in 
something; therefore, (b) I will assert this to be the case. Now, 
beliefs which are embraced to satisfy a psychological need and 
not because they are initially thought to be true, will tend to 
be unsatisfying, as actions directed to securing pleasure instead 
of to the achievement of some definite objective which is thought 
to be worthwhile, are unsatisfying. 

Such beliefs are unsatisfying not because they are not thought 
to be true—for the rationalizing reason quickly disguises from 
us the motives for their adoption and they come to appear true 
on merits—but because they are embraced for the wrong reasons. 
Truth is logically prior to the satisfaction which is felt in the 
conviction “this is true”. Indeed, such satisfaction depends 
upon the prior conviction of truth. If our conviction of the 
truth of a belief is only a by-product of the need to hold it, 
if it is, in fact, only a rationalization of the need to believe, 
the conviction will not effectively serve the purpose which 
led to the rationalization. This is the defect of all beliefs 
which are embraced on pragmatic grounds, embraced, that is 
to say, not because they are initially seen to be true, but because 
they serve the purposes of those who embrace them. 

The fact that beliefs so founded are unsatisfying has a further 
consequence which is bad, the consequence, namely, that the 
beliefs will tend to be violent. Again, the analogy with Hedonism 
is helpful. If it is held that pleasure is the only good, then clearly, 
the more pleasure, the better. Hence, a life conducted according 
to the dictates of Hedonism will be a life devoted to the pursuit 
of violent satisfaction just because quantitatively they are the 


152 A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 

most immediately satisfying. Similarly, if belief, belief for its 
own sake, belief, that is to say, which is embraced for the sake 
of believing since not to believe anything is felt to be intolerable, 
and not truth is the end, the more belief, the better. 

To put the point differently, if men believe in order to satisfy 
a psychological need, the more violent and intolerant the belief, 
the greater the satisfaction. Hence arises the group of violent 
and irrational beliefs that distinguish our own time. Men embrace 
the creeds of Fascism and Communism with an intolerant 
dogmatism which is a reflexion less of the truth of the tenets 
they profess, than of their own need to feel them to be true. 
Clear cut and dogmatic beliefs lend themselves to intolerant and 
violent advocacy and so satisfy the psychological needs which 
led to their adoption. 

If there is any force in these considerations, it is no accident 
that ages of intolerant dogma violently maintained should so 
often have succeeded ages of moral scepticism and religious 
agnosticism. Sap the foundations of rational belief in God, in 
truth, in goodness and in beauty, as Logical Positivism cannot 
help but do, confine meaningful assertions to matters of em¬ 
pirical fact and you sow the seeds of intolerance and dogmatism, 
as weeds spring up where a man cuts down a healthy crop yet 
puts nothing in its place. Communism and Fascism are the 
natural by-products of scepticism and nihilism. Most men need 
a creed and there is nothing in the empirical world upon which 
a creed can be based. For the empirical world contains nothing 
but the movements of matter and these, though they can be 
observed, cannot be believed. It is thus no accident that 
Logical Positivism tends to undermine rational and to encour¬ 
age irrational beliefs, and that, as Oxonian remarked, the belief 
in Fascism should tend to spring up in the “vacuum left by 
an abeyance of concern with fundamental human values”. 


INDEX 


A 

Anaximander, 140 
Aquinas, St. Thomas, 11 
Aristotle, 65, 119, 136, 138, 142, 
150 

Athanasius, St., 13 
Augustine, St., 13 
Ayer, A. J., passim 

B 

Berkeley, Bishop, 18-20, 28 
Bradley, F. H., 11 
Body, the, 102, 103 

G 

Carnap, R., 63, 64, 67, 73 
Christianity, 14, 28, 146-7 
Collingwood, R. G., 150 
Conquest of Happiness, The, 123 

D 

Democritus, 140 
Descartes, n 
Dewey, J., 120 
Durham, B., 147-8 

E 

Eliot, T. S., 149 

Emotive Theory of Ethics, The, 24 

Experience, Nature of, 50-6, 59-62 

F 

Facts, sensory and non-sensory, 63, 

64 

Fichte, 121 


G 

General Principles, 87-91 
H 

Hegel, 11, 39, 144 
Historical knowledge, 55-9, 141 
History of Western Philosophy, A, 119 
Hume, 12, 19, 28, 59, hi, 143 

I 

Implication, 88 

Induction, principle of, 88-90 

Infinite regress, 46-50, 84-5 

J 

Johnson, Dr., 18 
K 

Kant, 94 

L 

Leibnitz, 11 

Leucippus, 140 

Locke, 14, 18, 105 

Logical constructions, 47, 79-86 

Logical Syntax of Language, 64 

M 

Man Against Myth, 147 
Marriage and Morals, 123 
Material things, 33, 36-8, 47, 89, 90 
Meaning, sense of, 95, 96 
Mill, J. S., 28, 143 
Moore, G. E., 35 


i53 


154 


A CRITIQUE OF LOGICAL POSITIVISM 


N 

New Statesman , The , 9, 15, 115 
O 

Ostensive propositions, 38-40 
Oxonian, 9, 17, 115, 152 

P 

Philosophical knowledge, tradi¬ 
tional, 10, 27-8, 64-5, 69 
Plato, 10, 11, 64, 65, 77 
Plotinus, 120 
Power philosophies, 120 
Principles of Social Reconstruction , 123 
Freedom and Organisation , 123 

R 

Refutation of Idealism , The , 35 
Robinson, R., 24 
Russell, B., 95, 118-23 
Ryle, G., 15 

S 

Self, analysis of, 101-7 
Sense-contents, 32-42, 47-50 


Solipsism, 33-5, 103-5 
Spinoza, 11 

Subjectivism in ethics, 30, 108-13 
Substance, Locke’s, 105 

T 

Tautologies, 29, 31, 68, 69, 90, 91 
Truth, 91, 100, 119-22 

U 

Utilitarianism, 30 
V 

Value, emotive theory of, 113-18 
criticism of, 119-35 
objective theory of, 108, 
135-42 

subjective theory of, 108-13 
Verification principle, 43-62, 65-72 
Viennese circle, the, 12 

W 

Whitehead, A. N., 11 
Wisdom, J., 15 
Wittgenstein, L., 73 
Words, status of, 82-6, 98-100 
























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